Fire cuts off BT web and phone services

BT is scrambling to get its broadband up and running today after a fire caused hours of disruption and headaches for thousands across London.

The outage affected phone and internet connections in central, western and northern London, but the list of areas experiencing broadband problems continues to expand. Issues have been reported as far as Sussex, Kent and Essex.

Disruptions surfaced after a fire broke out this morning at a BT building near Paddington, according to a Zen Internet service alert.

The website posted BT's response: "BT is currently assessing the impact of the damage but will only know the full extent of the impact once the site has been declared safe and our engineers are able to enter the building. This incident is receiving BT's full operational team's response with a priority on restoring services as quickly as possible."

BT was unable to predict when its services would be functioning properly.