Hyperoptic Customers Hit by Major Broadband Outage Across UK

• Thousands of Hyperoptic customers woke up to no internet access this morning as the full fibre broadband provider suffered a significant network outage affecting multiple cities.

Outage Began Around 7am

The problems started around 7am, with reports of lost connectivity flooding in from London, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham and other major urban centers where Hyperoptic operates.

“I couldn’t log on for my morning video call,” said Sarah Thompson, 38, a graphic designer in Shoreditch. “It’s incredibly frustrating when you rely on your broadband for work.”

Provider Acknowledges Issues

Hyperoptic quickly acknowledged the disruption on social media, stating: “We’re currently facing service disruptions in a number of areas. Our team is on it and working hard to get everything back up and running.”

However, the company’s network status page appeared to be malfunctioning, returning only a vague “Some issue occurred” error message to worried customers.

DNS Issue Suspected

Tech-savvy users discovered that changing their DNS settings to a third-party provider like Google or Quad9 restored access, pointing to a likely DNS issue at the heart of the outage.

“It’s concerning that an ISP of Hyperoptic’s size can have its DNS infrastructure go down like this,” commented IT consultant Mark Barber, 45, from Camden. “They need more redundancy built into their network.”

Complaints Tapering Off

As of 9:30am, the volume of complaints on social media and outage reporting sites began to taper off, suggesting Hyperoptic engineers may have identified and started resolving the underlying problem.

The provider has yet to issue an official statement on the cause or extent of the outage. Hyperoptic claims its network reaches over 1.73 million premises across 64 UK towns and cities.

Compensation Unclear

It remains unclear if affected customers will be compensated for the downtime. Hyperoptic’s service level agreement promises 99.9% availability, which technically allows for over 8 hours of outages per year.

“A few hours of lost connectivity is hugely disruptive in this day and age,” argued Olivia Jones, 33, a financial analyst from Hackney. “Hyperoptic needs to do better by its customers when major outages like this occur.”

Outage Exposes Risks

This morning’s disruption exposes the risks of Britain’s increasing reliance on full fibre broadband as legacy copper networks are switched off. With over 39% of UK homes now on FTTP, network reliability is paramount.

Hyperoptic, along with larger rivals Openreach and Virgin Media, will need to prove they have sufficiently resilient infrastructure to maintain the always-on connectivity that homes and businesses now expect and require. Customers will be watching closely to see how providers respond to and learn from events like today’s outage.