Tesco broadband back online after network outage

Tesco has apologised to customers after its broadband service crashed yesterday, leaving thousands without internet access.

The supermarket blamed the outage on a technical fault with its network, but said the problem has now been fixed.

A spokeswoman told IT Pro: "The problem was a fault at a network level and was resolved last night for all customers. I'm afraid I can't confirm how many customers may have been affected at this stage."

However, the BBC claimed up to 10,000 of Tesco broadband's 75,000 users around the country lost connectivity after the incident occurred at 12pm yesterday.

Mobile operator TalkTalk is buying Tesco's broadband network, along with video streaming service Blinkbox, as it moves to become a quad-play operator similar to BT, offering landline, mobile, pay-TV and broadband services.

But Tesco said the outage wasn't related to the sale.

The spokeswoman said yesterday: "We are liaising with our network partner [Vodafone] to get the issue resolved as quickly as possible and apologise to any customers affected for the inconvenience."

However, the problem has echoes of Three's network outage across Ireland earlier this month, which affected 1.5 million users.

Many of those users appeared to be O2 customers who'd been transferred to Three's service following the 10.25 billion acquisition of O2 by Thrtee owner Hutchinson in March.

Three released a statement at the time blaming the problem on an overheated data centre, rather than on the O2 buy-out.

This article was originally published on 21/04/2015 at 5pm, and was subsequently updated on 22/04/2015 at 1pm after Tesco brought its service back online.