'Major' outage at Plusnet borks Brits' browsing, irate folk finger DNS

Apparent snafu leaves people unable to watch cat videos at 5am. The horror!

Plusnet, the internet service provider, has suffered a "Major Service Incident" which started on Wednesday night. The outage continued until this morning.

Users are complaining that they cannot visit a number of websites. Some were able to mitigate the TITSUP by changing their DNS provider.

A Plusnet staffer told its community forums:

We are in the process of investigating this now. I will provide on this thread, and our Twitter pages as soon as I receive more information.

Our systems where we provide the service status are also unfortunately down, but I will endeavour to get one up as soon as I have the facility to.

Really sorry for the inconvenience caused.

There has been a service outage. We are in the process of investigating this now, and we will hopefully have an update for you shortly. ^MC

— Plusnet Help (@plusnethelp) September 10, 2015

The Register rang Plusnet's customer service line, where a recorded message informed us that "Unfortunately due to a major service incident we have very high wait times at the moment."

Customers took to Twitter in the early hours to vent their frustrations:

Seems @Plusnet have major DNS issues. Switching to Google DNS worked for me, 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4

— Quentin James (@QuentinJames) September 10, 2015

@plusnet @plusnethelp Definite issues UK Wide.Using @opendns fails too. Some IP addr inside PN will ping. Major Routing Issues my guess.

— Tim Finch (@timbald) September 10, 2015

@therealdeangill @Plusnet same here - internet down and conveniently, customer service number won't connect. Award winning service?

— Simon (@hotelinsight) September 10, 2015

El Reg tweeted Plusnet for comment on the outage. A spokesman said, via email:

Since early this morning we’ve experienced an outage which affected our phone and broadband service as well as our website. We’ve worked throughout the night to resolve this and have made a lot of progress with most of our customers now up and running. However we still have a few issues which we’re working to solve as soon as possible. We would like to sincerely apologise to our customers for the inconvenience caused.

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