We are very sorry for the long outage affecting all our ADSL customers on Monday evening. The problem arose around 16:00 when a core router detected an internal error and restarted itself. The cause of the error is being investigated, but such a restart should cause the router to load fail-safe firmware and resume normal operation within 10 seconds.
Unfortunately on this occasion, a configuration error resulted in an old version of firmware being loaded. This alone should not have been a problem, but unfortunately the older firmware was incompatible with the current configuration in a very subtle way, resulting in unexpected behaviour which took significant time to diagnose.
Once the cause became clear, the correct firmware and configuration were restored and service resumed. Due to the way BT’s network reacts to outages in our network, the restoration of connections occurs over a period. Most lines were working again by 19:15. Some lines took longer, some customer routers also needed resetting.
Steps have been taken to prevent such a chain of events happening again. We also apologise for the time it took us to get a status message posted in our support area. This is being corrected.
Finally, some customers had difficulty contacting us by phone. Please use 020 7517 4902 – this also automatically calls a mobile number 07812 811116 as well.