Hyperoptic customers left in dark as power outage takes down systems

What falls down and doesn't get back up? Full fiber broadband in Glasgow

UK broadband provider Hyperoptic has taken a long weekend, leaving some customers disconnected after the company's systems went down following a storm.

The outage affected several of the company's Scottish customers and, according to a Register reader and the company's helpline, parts of the Glasgow region remain resolutely down.

The problems began on Friday, when Storm Éowyn, "probably the strongest storm" to hit the UK in at least ten years, according to the Met Office, arrived, causing a power outage in the region. Power was quickly restored, but connectivity was not for many Hyperoptic customers.

According to our reader: "I spoke to an engineer and their UPS [Uninterruptible Power Supply] appears to be fried now, with the input meter reading 0."

UPSes are a common feature of datacenters and have been for years. In addition to batteries, many companies also rely on generators to keep the lights on in the event of a power failure. Still, you'd expect a broadband provider like Hyperoptic to have plenty of redundancy and a support contract to ensure customers are not left in the dark in terms of connectivity.

Hyperoptic seemingly had to wait out the weekend until its UPS supplier could deal with the problem. We contacted the company to confirm this was the case, but other than an acknowledgment of our request, it did not comment. Considering the mission-critical nature of the system, however, we'd expect response time for a UPS problem to be measured in minutes or hours rather than days.

Last night, affected customers had already been offline for four days. However, our reader told us: "Their compensation requirements only kick in after two working days, not actual days, of outage."

Hyperoptic, which brought the UK's first residential 1 Gb broadband service to London in 2011, proudly proclaims that it only offers full fiber broadband. This means fiber-to-the-premises or fiber-to-the-building rather than a service that stops at the street cabinet and relies on legacy copper cables for the rest of the way. It also claims an average download and upload speed of 900 Mbps, assuming the service is up.

The Register asked Hyperoptic if the prolonged outage was down to the UPS issues as our reader suggested. We also asked how compensation would work. However, other than the company's head of brand and communications promising the Hyperoptic would "come back to you shortly," we have heard no more.

A recorded message on the customer support line this morning says services to Bishopton, a Renfrewshire village about 4 miles (6.5 km) northwest of Glasgow Airport (where a Second World War Royal Ordnance Factory was once sited), are still down. ®

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