Power surge blamed for BT broadband outage
BT's big broadband outage on Monday was caused by a power surge, the telco has said.
The outage, which affected hundreds of thousands of customers around the UK, was originally put down to a power failure, but a BT spokesman told ZDNet UK on Tuesday that a surge had been to blame.
Most of those affected — up to five percent of the ISP's customers, BT estimates — had their broadband back up and running within an hour of the issue striking. BT noted that "some business customers' broadband service may have been affected for a slightly longer period", but said all customers were now connected again.
The scale of the problem overwhelmed BT's customer support lines with "an exceptionally large number of calls that overflowed into other call-handling queues", the company said in a statement, adding that some customers had been sent messages telling them to log onto bt.com instead.
The power surge took place at a major BT facility in Birmingham, and its repercussions were felt as far away as Northern Ireland. The outage began around 1pm on Monday.
BT said it was difficult to figure out precisely how many people were inconvenienced, as many may not have been trying to go online at the time.
"Many had their service restored before they noticed any outage," the telco said.