BT Wholesale outage in Slough causes issues across South of England (Wed 30th)

Yesterday I had a backup ADSL line provisioned at the school in a different building to the server room in case something nasty happens to the server room. Today at 6pm I planned to test the automatic failover on the router by pulling the phone cable on our main Zen Internet VDSL connection. Was irritated to find it didn't work.

Then I discovered the router did fail over correctly, but the backup line was completely down. Then I found out Plusnet was down for a lot of the area, which I thought was quite an impressive feat for me simulating an outage on site.

The initial reports were of fibre damage in Slough at about 5.30pm, though late this evening BT have announced its a core 21CN router issue. However, it seems like it must be a big one, because comments on Twitter report resultant problems further away in Andover, Swindon, and even Purbeck. At least one ISP reports their Ethernet (leased line) services are down in the area too.

Talked to some local contacts this evening who are also on Plusnet, and bizarrely, of the two exchanges in town, only one of them is affected.

Guessing a few BT engineers are working overtime tonight...