BT broadband goes down for thousands

BT has apologised after leaving thousands of broadband customers unable to access the internet earlier this week.

According to BT, the outage affected customers in the south east, East Anglia, the East Midlands and 'potentially other areas'.

The problem started on Monday night; and on Twitter, the company claimed yesterday that it was fixed, adding that the outage was caused by problems with the Domain Name System (DNS) lookup process.

However, the company's own service status page shows that there are still problems in certain areas, including Broadstairs, Mossley and London's Gipsy Hill - although these may be unrelated to the original outage.

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And even in those regions where service has been restored, many users are reporting that speeds are slower than usual. "Mine's still rubbish," tweets one.

"Same here still slow. I was promised a follow up call, but no contact or help. Poor," adds another.

Others have pointed out the irony in the fact that BT chose to alert customers to the outage using Twitter, one of the services they were unable to access.

The problems are particularly irritating, given that BT broadband customers were recently hit with a price rise of nearly 4%.

Many people, especially those who work at home, are questioning whether they can claim compensation for the lack of service. There's information here on the company's service guarantee; in essence, it allows customers on Standard Care to start claiming an allowance after six days without service, while for those on PromptCare, it's two days.

Mind you, all you'll get by doing this is a refund of your line rental for the period that you were without service - which will be peanuts. After the company's six-day grace period, it is possible to claim for actual financial loss up to a maximum of £1,000, but it won't be easy.