BT fire and flood causes mass broadband and phone outage

Thu 01 Apr 2010 2 Comments

fireTens of thousands of customers are unable to connect to their broadband service following a fire and flood which hit a BT building in central London.

London Fire Brigade attended the scene at 7.30am yesterday at the ironically named Burne House in Paddington following an electric fault. The building was then flooded to put out the fire causing serious problems with surrounding telephone exchanges.

BT has suggested around 30 exchanges have been affected although others, including the likes of Zen Internet have suggested the local exchanges experiencing problems are in the hundreds.

BT released a statement at 8.30am this morning updating customers on the situation. It said: "Following major flooding at a BT exchange in the Paddington area, tens of thousands of customers in parts of North and West London may be experiencing a loss of broadband and/or telephone service. Customers in other parts of the country may also be affected."

It's been suggested Pipex Business customers and O2 mobile phone users are also experiencing service problems.

The spokesperson added: "The flood water has been removed from the exchange building overnight and power supply has begun to be restored. We are now beginning to restore communications services to customers and this work will continue throughout the day. We will issue further updates as this work progresses."

Customers experiencing problems are advised to use their mobile phones if they need to make calls to the emergency services. Meanwhile those affected can call 0800 1690199 to listen to the latest service status updates.

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Comments

  • unhappy

    by Colin at 19:27 on 1 Apr 2010Report abuse

    I'm one of those without broadband and I live in Hampshire. I returned to find the usual (un)helpful WIndows message "Cannot connect to DNS server. In "Network and Sharing Centre" the diagram suggests I am connected and my BT modem reports it IS connected, but I still have no service. I have had to buy a mobile dongle to get online today.
    Not helpful of Pipex to wait ages before putting this outage on their webpage - I phoned the 0871 helpline twice and waited ages before I got through - obviously loads of Pipex customers were also wondering what was going on.
    If this is the best broadband can offer in 2010 - one outage removes service for thousands, then I suggest be focus on better resilience, rather than faster speeds, for the next few years!

  • neutral

    by Mark Philips at 09:53 on 3 Apr 2010Report abuse

    I have been without my PIPEX service for 4 days and initially spent ages trying to contact them on a premium rate line. I work in IT and we regularly run disaster recovery tests from a remote location to ensure business continuity. Clearly neither BT or PIPEX have this in place. This is commercial suicide as customers will go elswhere!

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