UK hit by nationwide ADSL crash

The crash hit ADSL subscribers around 10am this morning. According to one report, over 110,000 users were affected, as well as some narrow-band unmetered customers.

A BT spokesman confirmed that there was a fault with BT's IP backbone network -- known as Colossal -- this morning. "The service is now restored, and engineers are checking the resiliance of the network now," he told ZDNet UK on Tuesday afternoon.

It is unclear what caused the fault. "That's something that the engineers are investigating now," said the spokesman.

ISPs that buy ADSL capacity from BT Wholesale will have been affected, but there are reports that some ADSL users were not hit.

One unimpressed ADSL user said: "For the amount of money broadband costs, users should receive an uninterrupted high-speed Internet connection all the time." He added that he had found it impossible to get through to BT's telephone helpdesk this morning. --Graeme Wearden, ZDNet UK