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Zen loses its chill: UK biz ISP falls offline for four hours and counting

TITSUP: Total Inability To Support Upset Punters

Updated Beloved business-friendly ISP Zen has been suffering an outage for more than four hours today in the UK – and the carrier has no timetable for when service will be restored.

A Zen status notice said that many of its business and residential customers are unable to connect to its network from mid-afternoon, UK time, due to what looks to be a failure in the BT systems Zen uses for its infrastructure.

The outage is affecting both the Zen DSL and leased line internet services, with major cities including London, Manchester, and Leeds all cut off.

"Our supplier's engineers are still investigating the cause of the outage," Zen says – and by supplier we expect this to mean BT. "Further updates will be provided as they become available."

Zen outage details

More than 40 area codes have been impacted

As Reg readers note, the outage has been going on for some time:

Among the oldest ISPs in the UK, Zen's leased line internet services are popular with small businesses seeking wider data pipelines and more personalized service from an independent provider.

That service comes at a cost, however. Because Zen relies on BT for the lines that carry most of its traffic, the company can be vulnerable to outages such as this. ®

Updated to add

We're told BT engineers restored Zen's connectivity shortly after midnight, UK time, after roughly eight hours of downtime. Another indie ISP Gradwell was also affected.

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