Sky Fixes Fibre Broadband After Network Upgrade Causes Outage

Sky suffered a nationwide fibre outage on Tuesday as a network upgrade prevented its customers from getting online.

“We are aware that fibre customers are having issues browsing, engineers are investigating. Sorry for making your morning more stressful,” it told frustrated customers on Twitter.

The company no longer gives detailed breakdowns of its broadband customer base, so it’s difficult to know how many fibre subscribers it has. TechWeekEurope estimates Sky has slightly more than six million customers (copper and fibre) in the UK and Ireland.

Sky Fibre

Evidence from DownDetector and Twitter suggests the problems were occurring across the country. Services were restored by 10am on Tuesday, and although some users are reporting continued issues with their connection, Sky says there are no problems today.

The outage comes at a time when Sky is looking to tempt more people into taking out multi-play services with the company, offering a year’s worth of free fibre (albeit with a 25GB limit) to television customers in time for the new football season.

It added 347,000 new broadband customers during its 2016 financial year, but additions have slowed. Only 70,000 joined during the second half of the year, compared to 277,000 in the first sixth months.

BT has just reported that of the 95,000 entirely new broadband customers that joined the Openreach network in Q4, its retail division snapped up 79 percent.

Although the fault was repaired much more rapidly than the BT outages last week, Sky could have done without the issues given that some BT users might have been tempted to jump ship.

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