BT Endures Second Day Of Internet Disruption

BT's internet customers have been enduring a second day of service disruption - blamed by the company on a power issue - now said to be fixed.

Frustrated home and business users flocked to Twitter (Xetra: A1W6XZ - news) to vent their fury at the latest issues this morning.

Six hours later, BT said in an updated statement: "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 (London's) 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."

The problem was different to the power issue that plagued the company's 10 million customers on Wednesday morning and was later fixed.

That failure came just 24 hours after a report by the Culture, Media and Sport committee of MPs said BT "must put its house in order or face a split".

It said BT should have been investing hundreds of millions of pounds a year more in its Openreach network and pointed to poor quality of service.

Customers criticised the company's performance on Twitter on Thursday - managing to vent their fury on the social media site despite the problems.

One - Silvertime Jewellery - called for the telecoms regulator to get involved. It wrote: "@Ofcom Can you please look into #BT , second day in a row that UK e-commerce is totally closed down. Major outage, no replies, no service."

The consumer group Which? tweeted: "It's only right that consumers are automatically compensated when their service is lost, as it has been for many #BT customers again today."