BT broadband is down: Former state monopoly goes TITSUP UK-wide UK telco BT is suffering a major broadband outage: it appears the comms giant is caught up in a near-nationwide blackout, with more than 12,000 reports of service problems on Down Detector. The web connectivity monitor has been flooded with complaints from vast parts of the UK, from London and Birmingham to Manchester and …
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I have BT Infinity apparently working on the other side of the bridges from Bangor, LL.
I am accessing it remotely via Plusnet (aka BT Sheffield) from Birmingham.
Obviously both will stop working shortly, following this post.
Neither www.bt.com nor www.btplc.com are responding from Birmingham.
Only www.bt.com is reliably working from Bangor, btplc often gets a server timeout.
All data from tests in last 20 minutes. YMMV.
Anybody got a Dummies Guide to Disaster Tolerance going spare.
Probably no point asking them to comment, apparently the phones are dead, no reaching customer service, not a huge leap to think maybe they have no internet or email either. One might wonder if this is a denial of service attack, everything works right up to the CHAP authentication but the server never responds with either a success or failure message so after multiple tries a failure is assumed.
"One might wonder if this is a denial of service attack, everything works right up to the CHAP authentication but the server never responds with either a success or failure message so after multiple tries a failure is assumed."
I wonder if it's possible in these days of always-on connections for a small hiccup to turn into a self-generated DDoS if the whole BT network blips and than EVERY customer modem tries to re-authenticate? Does anyone ever turn off their modem/router these days?
"a self-generated DDoS if the whole BT network blips and than EVERY customer modem tries to re-authenticate?"
In the days before fibre broadband, BT Retail didn't use the DSL username+password stuff that practically every other ISP used, they simply checked that the line ID presented to the kit was a valid line ID for BT Broadband.
At that stage, some thought had apparently been given to this kind of thing. Probably all lost in the mists of time (and spreadsheets) now.
"In the days before fibre broadband, BT Retail didn't use the DSL username+password stuff that practically every other ISP used, they simply checked that the line ID presented to the kit was a valid line ID for BT Broadband."
not quite true - it did need a user name and password. But username could be anything@btbroadband.com
Us contractors for BT usually set them up as user= "btuser@btbroadband.com" with password "btuser"
That worked on all BT domestic connections
"That worked on all BT domestic connections"
It would. 'Cos like I said, while the BT Wholesale CentralPlus service was around (which was designed for and exclusively used by BT Retail), it don't need no username and password for authentication, just the circuit ID, which is provided by the infrastructure rather than the end user. So all that typing may have been even less necessary than you thought.
Feel free to look up BT's SIN for CentralPlus if you like (it's over a decade so I could be misremembering, but I don't think I am).
It would. 'Cos like I said, while the BT Wholesale CentralPlus service was around (which was designed for and exclusively used by BT Retail), it don't need no username and password for authentication, just the circuit ID,
Ever so slightly different now (or was 6-9 months ago, whenever they put my Infinity in).
The username/password still isn't technically used by a HomeHub. The Modem's MAC is whitelisted and the authentication works/fails based on that - they managed to send out a batch of HH's without authorising them to connect them to the network, so I had a very confused engineer here at the time.
As others have said, yesterday, CHAP was failing. Prior to that though packets were making it 1 hop into BT's network and then falling off the network
"Prior to that though packets were making it 1 hop into BT's network and then falling off the network"
Falling off the network that **you and other BT customers** can see?
I have no idea how this 21CN stuff works internally, but its 20CN predecessor was at one point using Cisco Express Forwarding (?) to get encapsulated Ethernet packets from BT's broadband customer-side kit (BRAS??? Not DSLAM) over to BT's core internal network and then out again to kit at the ISP in question.
That journey from BT remote access kit to ISP kit could be multiple hops along BT's internal routed network, but none of those hops were normally visible to end users trying to use traceroute to diagnose what was going on. Think of it like tunneling, if you wish.
Things may well be different by now.
Fault resolution doesn't seem to be any better :(
[I was there when Pipex invited mass market broadband in the UK, and there soon after when BTw were having major issues because of end-user packet fragmentation across their CEF network, and when BTw were denying that they had problems with exchange backhaul congestion, and... I've lost track/interest since then, it's all too depressingly (un)predictable].
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