Sky Broadband outage leaves thousands without internet for 18 hours… and counting

Engineers are battling to find a solution to an ongoing broadband outage that impacts thousands of Sky Broadband customers across the South-East of England and parts of Wales, including Cardiff. The problems first appeared last night (September 1) at around 6.30pm. Sky confirmed the issues, promising that teams would be looking into what was causing the mass outage overnight. However, it has now been almost 18-hours since frustrated customers first flagged up the problems.

Since Sky owns and operates NOW, formerly NOW TV, customers with NOW Broadband hubs in their home will also be without internet today too.

Sky has apologised to customers impacted by the outage, which is one of the longest in recent memory. A spokesperson for Sky told Express.co.uk, “We are aware of issues impacting Sky Broadband and Talk customers in Cardiff and parts of South East England. We are investigating the issue and we’re sorry for any inconvenience this may be causing.”

In the latest update shared by customer care representatives running the @SkyHelpTeam account on Twitter, it was revealed that engineers are still working on a fix. There is no estimated completion time for the solution. The tweet reads: “Engineers are still currently on site and working towards a resolution to restore services ASAP. More updates to follow when available.”

Independent website DownDetector, which tracks reports from customers across social media to monitor the performance of web services, reported a huge spike in complaints from Sky Broadband customers last night. At its peak, some 2,329 customers were voicing concerns about their broadband connection not working every minute.

Reports on social media are beginning to pick up this morning too, with more than 687 people complaining about poor broadband connections at the time of writing. These reports are trending upwards too. That makes sense, as more and more people wake up and attempt to login to their work email, check social media, stream their favourite Netflix boxset in bed – the problems are likely to be spotted by more customers across the UK.

Using geolocation data from the social media posts, DownDetector is able to place the complaints on a map. According to this data, the areas most likely to be impacted are London, Cardiff, Oxford and Brighton. Out of those affected, the vast majority (98 percent) are reporting issues with their Sky internet connection.