BT has apologised for a problem that affected broadband subscribers across the UK on Saturday, and caused a wide range of websites to become inaccessible.
“Sorry about the issues many of you had accessing the Internet this morning,” BT said on its @BTCare Twitter feed. “Problem is now fixed- sorry for any trouble caused.”
BT’s network status page labelled the issue as a “major broadband problem”, but didn’t offer details as to what had caused the outage.
The problem was fixed as of around midday on Saturday, according to the status feed, which said customers had had “trouble accessing the Internet on BT Broadband, or… issues getting to specific websites”.
BT, which has around seven million broadband subscribers in the UK, said it was still investigating the incident, and was unable to say how many users had been affected.
“We can confirm some customers had issues connecting to the internet on Saturday morning,” a BT spokesperson told TechWeekEurope, “The issue was fixed within a couple of hours and we apologise for any inconvenience caused.”
Users from various parts of the UK reported being able to access some sites, while others, including social media, banking, shopping sites and BT’s own help pages, were unavailable.
Problems were reported by users in Cornwall, Hinckley, Eastbourne, Preston, Tunbridge Wells, Preston and elsewhere.
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While the problem may have ended up being a DNS issue (requests for websites were not fulfilled), the real reason was that the websites themselves were inaccessible because one of the major transatlantic cables was severed on Saturday (probably some fishing trawler).