Memset blames fibre issue for multi-hour outage

Damage to Openreach's cables in Clapham may have been to blame

British cloud hosting service provider Memset has said that a fibre infrastructure fault with the company's circuit providers was to blame for a lengthy outage earlier this week.

Iomart-owned Memset acknowledged the issue at 13:45 on Monday, saying it was investigating reports of network connectivity problems.

The firm said it had identified the issue, which was 'upstream of our Dunsfold Datacenter' and was affecting connectivity, about an hour later. It raised the issue 'as a fault with our circuit providers'.

Memset's phone lines were also affected.

Iomart later posted an update on Twitter, saying the company was in touch with BT, 'who has reported significant damage to the lines'.

'They're working to resolve the issue and will provide further updates as soon as more information becomes available.'

There was little news overnight, with Memset simply saying it was working with the provider to resolved the issue. However, the company later confirmed it had fully resolved the connectivity issue at 00:56 on Tuesday.

At 08:24 on Tuesday, Iomart tweeted that connectivity had been at least partially restored:

'Our team worked through the night with our partners at BT to resolve two separate issues affecting connectivity at our @Memset_Ltd site. We're pleased to confirm one path has been re-routed and restored.'

The company said it would continue to work with BT to repair the second path.

'We're extremely sorry for the inconvenience caused to our customers and thank you all for your patience.'

Openreach told The Register there was damage to its underground cables in the Clapham area, and teams were investigating the cause.

The outage comes about a couple of weeks after an internet blackout, due to a software bug at cloud computing provider Fastly, left many of the world's top websites offline for a brief period.

Fastly said the bug was triggered after a customer updated their configuration settings.

Sites affected included Amazon, Reddit, The Guardian, Twitch, Spotify and PayPal, among others.

Last year, a massive AWS outage impacted thousands of online sites and services, including Amazon's own. The company said the issue was triggered after new servers were added to the Amazon Kinesis real-time data processing service.