Right now an outage is on-going for many BT broadband customers across the UK. With many websites accessible, it may take days to resolve. It started last night, and coincided with a loss of their DNS server as well, but even 12 hours later they weren’t reporting any issues other than for a small number of places. The system status checker showed no issues in my area, even though I was talking with people on Twitter, living nearby, who had the same problems.
The thing is, even their Twitter account is unaware. They treat each report of an issue separately, tiredly trotting out useless suggestions such as “have you done a speed test” or similar codswallop. No matter how many people from an area report an issue, there seems to be no recognition that there may be a bigger problem going on.
This happened back in 2012 when BT had issues with massive packet loss to certain US sites. It took them a week to resolve and, consistent with this issue, BT failed to recognise (or at least communicate that they recognised) that they had an issue.
Last October it took BT a whole week to fix what was obviously a faulty router (something I told them on day one that it was, with evidence to back this up). Then in May of this year I commented on how BT ties your TV package with their broadband for no reason other than greed – switch ISP and your streaming TV channels will no longer work. This wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t been cheated over the TV – I signed up for their basic package (no extra channels) to get the YouView box they provided. However, after a few months I ended up on their entertainment package, costing a lot more. No paper trail, no evidence and BT wouldn’t accept that I hadn’t signed up for this.
Needless to say I’ve been planning on getting rid of them for some time. The current outage is the proverbial “straw that broke the camel’s back”. I rang BT to see how much I’d have to pay to get out of my remaining contracts earlier. As I only had TV left, it was just £7. I couldn’t act quick enough, and have now signed up for a broadband and phone package with another ISP1. My service is due to move 2 weeks today.
I can’t wait.
- a smaller one, a bit more expensive but one that has a reputation for customer service ↩︎
Talk to me!