Customers of Sky, BT and TalkTalk today experienced a mass internet outage across parts of the UK.
The cause of the issue was a fire in an Openreach building in Newcastle, which damaged the cables carrying internet to the region.
The vast Openreach network is used by internet providers BT, Plusnet and TalkTalk, with rival Virgin using independent infrastructure.
Thousands of customers reported issues getting online and making calls from around 12:00pm, and it was not resolved for several hours.
Of all complaints regarding the three broadband providers, the vast majority (93 per cent) were due to a lack of internet access, according to Downdetector, which monitors online outages.
It appears the bulk of the connectivity faults were in the North-East of England but a significant amount were also reported outside this region.
Downdetector also showed clear connectivity problems for EE’s fixed internet, with a high volume of complaints in Gateshead, Newcastle and Sunderland.
EE is owned by BT and its broadband service also runs on the Openreach network.
Pictured, TalkTalk outage as reported by users via Downdetector. It shows a large-scale problem across the UK
Pictured, live outage map of issues for Plusnet. A spokesperson said the issue was due to a fire which had now been contained
Pictured, live outage map for BT. It appears the bulk of the connectivity issues were in the North-East of England but a large concentration were also reported outside of this region
BT’s service status website confirmed the provider had been affected by an outage in the Newcastle and Jesmond area.
A BT spokesperson told MailOnline: ‘Following a suspected small fire at one of our sites in Newcastle earlier today, some customers were unable to make calls or access their broadband services, mainly in the Newcastle area.
‘The fire was quickly contained and no one was hurt.
‘Broadband is fully restored and only a small number of customers are unable to make calls and we expect this to be fixed very soon.
‘We’re sorry for any inconvenience.’
Meanwhile, a spokesperson for TalkTalk said: ‘Some customers in and around the North East of England experienced a loss of service for a short period of time earlier today due to a fire at a BT exchange in Newcastle, impacting a number of providers.
‘The fire has now been contained, and service has been restored for our broadband customers. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.”
Commenting on the outage, Dan Howdle, consumer telecoms analyst at UK mobile and broadband comparison, said most UK networks have handled increased traffic during the coronavirus lockdown well.
‘The reported BT and TalkTalk outages are certainly set to frustrate those still attempting to work from home, but historically both networks have been swift in addressing the problems, so will likely be a short-term inconvenience rather than an extended issue,’ he adds.
‘Households will still be able to connect to the internet by using their mobile device as a WiFi hotspot, although those choosing to do so in order to continue to work from home should be aware that using your mobile in such a way will use up data, and any data-intensive activity – such as video streaming – will speed up this process, so you need to be aware of your limits.’
Lockdown has seen huge demand for residential broadband, with traffic surging enormously in the UK.
Internet provider Openreach recorded the busiest day ever on its network on June 30.
That one day saw more than 189 petabytes of data consumed by customers via Openreach in the UK, smashing the previous record of 184 PB set on June 11.
An overall increase in internet consumption has been driven by adults working from home and children doing online lessons during the coronavirus pandemic.
Openreach says that in a pre-lockdown world, average weekly consumption was around 660 petabytes. At the start of June 2020, this soared to almost 1,000 PB.
However, the record-breaking days on June 11 and now on June 30 were largely due to the mass downloading of enormous Call of Duty updates.