BT‘s phone and broadband network across the country was rocked by unexplained outages on the afternoon of 2 February.
Reports of problems began to emerge between 1 PM and 4 PM, peaking at 18,399 complaints according to the website Down Detector.
The outages primarily affected customers in locations as far afield as London, Birmingham, Guildford, Manchester, Coventry, Ruislip, Sheffield, Glasgow, Leicester and Edinburgh, according to Down Detector’s tool.
"Sorry if you’re experiencing network problems," BT tweeted from its customer support account. "Engineers are on site now. We will keep you updated".
In a statement, BT said that service had largely been restored. It is now investigating the causes of the issues.
"Large numbers of customers have been experiencing temporary issues with their broadband services this afternoon," BT said. "Customers can still receive and make calls as normal."
"We’ve been working hard to fix the issue and are glad to report that nearly every customer affected is now reconnected, approximately two hours after the problem started.
"We apologise to any affected customers for the inconvenience.
"There is no evidence at this stage to suggest that we were subject to a malicious attack."
Twitter users quickly took to the site to blast BT.
"Any idea how long to fix? Business is losing money every minute," one customer tweeted at BT.
The problems will provide ammunition for critics of BT, many of whom are calling for BT’s wholesale arm, Openreach, to be split off from its parent company by Ofcom.
A recent report spearheaded by Grant Shapps and signed by a cross-party group of 121 MPs, titled ‘Broadbad’, claims that the UK’s internet infrastructure is lacking and firmly blames Openreach for this.
