BT network still in chaos

BT's IP network is still in chaos following yesterday's massive outage.

A recorded message on the BT Connect customer service line says: "The national service problems of yesterday are still causing problems with our service. Our engineers are working as rapidly as possible to resolve all remaining problems that are causing residual problems."

No one seems to have told BT's press office about this as they are still claiming that the network was "stabilised" at 18:40 yesterday, and some customers, including your correspondent, were able to reconnect this morning.

But comments from silicon.com readers have been flooding in throughout the day, reporting a plethora of problems with narrowband and DSL web access. BT-hosted sites were still unavailable long after the situation was reportedly "stabilised".

Though the primary problem seems to have been fixed, secondary problems appear to have spread like ripples on the surface of a pond, and many customers can look forward to more days of interrupted service before everything is back to normal.

One silicon.com reader put it very succinctly when he said: "Another frustrating day. It is obviously not just the local loop that needs looking at. I hope that BT will offer its customers a credible explanation.

"This underlies the importance of establishing an internet infrastructure where users have true choice with redundant network paths both from their local IP devices as well as through the backbones."

BT has as yet been unable to say exactly what caused the outage in the first place.