Some of the telcos which depend on BT's network to offer broadband services to their customers have been reporting a major outage affecting thousands of people in the North of England, Northern Ireland and the two biggest cities in Scotland.

ISP Zen Internet told its subscribers that BT's 20CN and 21CN circuits were currently hampered by an unknown problem "across multiple nodes".

The areas said to be affected by the outage are Edinburgh, Preston, Glasgow South, Newcastle Upon Tyne and parts of Northern Ireland.

In the past half an hour, AAISP told its customers that BT engineers were working on a fix. It added:

The affected router has had stopped process restarted and the controlled recovery of the device is being closely monitored. Service should be available within the next 30 minutes. The geographical area of impact is across Scotland, the North of England and Northern Ireland, on traffic that was terminating on this router.

BT-owned Plusnet also notified its customers of the outage.

The Register has asked BT to comment on this story - we'll update the piece once we hear more. ®