Plusnet criticised after serious outage

Credit: chrisdorney/Shutterstock.com

It appears the issue was caused by a malfunction with Plusnet's Domain Name System (DNS), which left users across the country unable to access many websites - including Plusnet's own.

The first problems were reported on social media not long after midnight on Thursday morning; customers with Plusnet-operated John Lewis and Vodafone broadband were also affected.

The incident has lead to concerns and complaints about the ISP's previously award winning customer service.

Is it just me?

Because the problem began in the early hours, not many users realised anything was wrong until several hours later. But there were people awake when it began:

They couldn't raise the issue with Plusnet themselves though, as since July the once 24-hour customer support line has only operated between the hours of 7.30am and 10pm - and the @PlusnetHelp Twitter account is only officially staffed from 9am to 7.30pm.

Even so, there wasn't much word from the ISP on what the issue was; Plusnet staff member and all round helpful type Matty Cassell couldn't add any clarity when he posted a brief update on the Plusnet customer forum:

Several canny customers had already worked out that it was DNS related, however, and took to social media, among them Quentin James:

What is DNS?

DNS - or Domain Name Service - is the technology that takes a web address as typed in by a user and converts it to an IP address made up of numbers, which is the address of the server where the website lives.

Without DNS, devices trying to connect to the internet don't know where they're supposed to be looking - basically, they can't translate the URL into an IP address - so while they may technically be connected to the internet, they can't do very much.

Users did find some sites were still accessible - but embarrassingly for Plusnet, their own wasn't one of them.

The technically confident who had diagnosed that it was indeed a DNS malfunction, were among many suggesting that people try switching to Google's public DNS - available on 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.

Google offer instructions on how to do this here, but advise that "only users who are proficient with configuring operating system settings" should attempt such changes.

There may be trouble ahead...

To give them credit, Plusnet's customer service hours are still longer than those of several other ISPs - but the Yorkshire operator hasn't been having the best time in terms of customer relations recently.

Some of those affected by this week's issues had been caught up in a similar, smaller, outage a couple of weeks ago.

And shortly after they announced the change to their customer service hours, they confirmed that new 38Mb fibre users could expect to get upload speeds of up to just 2Mb, rather than the up to 20Mb existing users can expect.

Rather than ripping the plaster off in one go, they then waited a few more weeks before announcing the price rises that have come into effect this month.

They've also removed all reference to their broadband being "truly" or "totally" unlimited, following concerns that their traffic management policy could be seen as limiting in itself.

The sound of silence

This time, though, the real cause for complaint has been about how Plusnet handled the outage. Among the frustrated replies on their forum was this, from Puffin:

Some users were reporting that they were back online as early as 9.30am, but many had to wait until later in the day for their service to be restored.

Everything should have been working again for everyone by 3.30pm, and customers who were still having issues were advised to reboot their routers - assuming, of course, that they could get online to see that advice.

Plusnet have confirmed that they're investigating why there were no service status updates of the sort suggested above as soon as it was known there was a problem - but in the meantime it's another blow for the once "customer service superheroes".