Equinix owns up for London broadband outage

BT has confirmed around 10% of its customers experienced an outage this morning, which has reportedly been linked to a power incident at the former Telecity LD8 site in London, now owned by Equinix.

BT first acknowledged the outage this morning on Twitter, which took down broadband services for a number of customers in the London area.

The LD8 data centre in London’s Docklands currently houses the London Internet Exchange (LINX), one of the world’s largest Internet Exchanges with more than 700 members which include ISPs such as BT and Virgin Media, as well as content providers.

“We’re sorry that some BT and Plusnet customers experienced problems accessing some internet services this morning,” said a BT spokesperson. “Around 10% of customers’ internet usage was affected following power issues at one of our internet connection partners’ sites in London. The issue has now been fixed and services have been restored.”

While the comment has stated the problem was limited to London, BT’s service status page does indicate dozens of cities and towns across the UK experienced issues. These service challenges have not been directly linked to the same incident to date.

The LD8 data centre has been under control of Equinix over recent months since the US company acquired Telecity for $3.8 billion. Equinix claims it is now the largest retail colocation provider in Europe and globally, after the deal added 34 data centres to the portfolio, though eight assets had to be off-loaded to keep competition powers in the European Commission happy.

“Equinix can confirm that we experienced a brief outage at the former Telecity LD8 site in London earlier this morning,” said a Equinix spokesperson. “This impacted a limited number of customers, however service was restored within minutes. Equinix engineers are on site and actively working with customers to minimise the impact.”

During email exchanges with Telecoms.com, neither BT or Equinix named either party, though this is understandable as it is a sensitive issue. Despite BT stating all services have been recovered at the time of writing the service status page lists dozens of towns and cities which are still experiencing problems. Although the incidents may not be directly linked, as long as service problems continue BT is likely to be facing a mounting customer service challenge.

UPDATE: 14.00, 21/07/2016 – After a second day of outages, BT gave the following statement to Telecoms.com:

We apologise to those BT customers who had problems connecting to some internet services this morning. Internet usage is now back to normal for consumer and small business customers. A small number of larger businesses may still be experiencing some limited internet access. Engineers should have these fixed soon.

The issue, which affected BT and other providers, was due to Telehouse North, one of our internet connection partners in the docklands, suffering power issues. The issue affected less than five percent of our customers’ internet usage, and BT took immediate action to minimise these issues by redirecting traffic.