Power outage affects large parts of BT’s broadband network

IP6netInternet, Technology

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Another major UK Internet outage occurred on Thursday morning, this time reportedly caused by a power failure at Telehouse North (TH10).

The outage appeared to have started at around 7am, with at least one network at Telehouse North falling over due to a reported loss of power. The situation had mostly been resolved by around 11am, though some UK broadband users are still reporting spotty connections.

Like Wednesday’s outage, it appears that BT has a significant amount of networking equipment at Telehouse North. The has affected an unknown number of BT and Plusnet broadband subscribers, plus other smaller ISPs and services such as Zen Internet that make significant use of BT’s backhaul network.

Telehouse issued the following statement:

We are aware that there has been an issue with the tripping of a circuit breaker within Telehouse North that has affected a specific and limited group of customers within the building. The problem has been investigated and the solution identified. Our engineers are working with our customers on the resolution right now. We will release updates in due course.

BT’s status page says:

We’re really sorry that some BT customers are experiencing problems accessing some Internet services this morning. It’s down to repeated power issues at one of our Internet connection partners sites in London. Engineers are on site now and working to fix the problems as fast as possible.

Telecity-owner Equinix said it had suffered “a brief outage” at its LD8 site in London on Wednesday morning.

The company was also keen to emphasise that its “global data centre footprint has reliability with an uptime of 99.9999 percent in 2015.” But that figure will be of little comfort to those customers who were struggling to access the Web earlier today, following Telecity’s outage.

LINX said—in an updated statement that stripped any mention of BT:

LINX understands that its members, over 700 network operators from around the world, expect us to operate continuously with a fully resilient network. We in turn demand the highest level of resilience from our data centre partners. We are waiting on the conclusion of Telecity’s investigation to understand the root cause of this incident, and the steps that will be taken to prevent any recurrence.

It confirmed the power failure affected other operators based at the Telecity site, and said that only one of its two fully redundant peering LANs—which are spread across 11 data centres—was affected by the outage.

The Internet exchange added: “80 percent of the traffic levels at the start of the incident continued to pass through LINX unaffected.”

Service disruption as a result of the Telecity outage lasted for about an hour, from just before 8am until 9:15am, when full connectivity was restored.

 

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