Following our report on the 31st of march that Sky were due to put a hold on new broadband and TV orders, we learned today that some customers in Plymouth, Devon and Cornwall have completely lost broadband service, with reports from DownDetector showing that many more have issues with their service across the whole of the UK.
Problems were noted very early (after midnight) and again from around 6.30am this morning.
Nearly all of the reported issues are around broadband quality, with a small percentage being around TV. Bearing in mind that many customers rely on the internet for TV services, it's lilkely that the TV complaints are due to poor broadband too.
A tweet was sent out this morning by the 'Sky help team' to confirm that customers in Cornwall have an amber light on their router, and that they are investigating. Affected customers can learn more by downloading and checking the sky app or by checking the service page at sky.com.
It now seems that the outages are due to multiple exchange outages. The 'exhange' is a BT-Openreach controlled building where Sky and other providers store and manage their network equipment that controls customer broadband connections.
The reason for failure could be on of a range of issues, but the fact that network traffic has increased dramatically may have overloaded parts of the network. Potential reduced availlability of maintenance engineers could also be a factor.
Whatever the cause, it seems to have been a prudent measure to stop new orders. We'll update you with any further news as it comes in.
Pete has worked in the telecoms industry for 16 years - and launched this comparison service to provide a better deal to customers nationwide.
