BT has apologised for an outage that affected broadband users in several parts of the country on Wednesday, as well as a large number of banks.
A power failure at a site in London was said to be responsible for the outage, which affected 10 per cent of BT broadband users and Plusnet customers in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
It also meant some banks were unable to provide online services, including Lloyds, Barclays, Natwest, Halifax, Ulster Bank, Santander, HSBC, Nationwide and Royal Bank of Scotland.
“We’re sorry that some BT and Plusnet customers experienced problems accessing some internet services this morning,” a BT spokesperson said.
“Around 10 per cent of customers’ internet usage was affected following power issues at one of our internet connection partners’ sites in London. The issue has now been fixed and services have been restored,” she added.
A BBC report claims the outage was actually due to data centre operator Equinix, which took control of the data centre involved as part of its takeover of the Telecity Group.
Equinix managing director in the UK, Russell Poole, said of the incident. “Equinix can confirm that we experienced a brief outage of the former Telecity LD8 site in London earlier this morning.
“This impacted a limited number of customers, however service was restored within minutes. Equinix engineers are on site and actively working with customers to minimise the impact.”
The outage comes at a bad time for BT, which was told by MPs that it needed to improve its internet business or Openreach would be split off and run as a separate business.
BT has since argued it is spending £1billion a year on infrastructure and to improve service levels and that splitting the company would make the situation worse.
Leave a Reply