A damaged undersea transatlantic cable is being blamed for causing havoc for Net and phone users in the UK last night. A number of ISPs are understood to have been hit by the problem, which surfaced (the problem, not the cable) yesterday afternoon at around 4pm. The cable - which is owned by a consortium of telcos - is believed to have hit a snag (figuratively speaking, of course) somewhere off the French coast. France Telecom, which is responsible for that section of cable, is sending a boat out to examine the damage.
At this stage it's not known exactly what the damage is or what caused it. However, the effects of the incident were felt in the UK last night. BT has confirmed that some of its voice services were hit by the outage, while NTL blamed the cable problem for downing its Net service - including web browsing, email, ftp and newsgroups - for around eight hours. The service was back up and running by around 1am today, although the cableco has conceded that some punters may still be suffering problems this morning.
Telewest confirmed that its customers also experienced difficulties accessing email and personal webspace for around four hours. Although it's still investigating the matter, a spokesman acknowledged that the problems could be a result of the damaged cable. And Tiscali said it was unaffected by the incident, although some of its punters may have found accessing US-based sites slower than usual.
News source: The Register
At this stage it's not known exactly what the damage is or what caused it. However, the effects of the incident were felt in the UK last night. BT has confirmed that some of its voice services were hit by the outage, while NTL blamed the cable problem for downing its Net service - including web browsing, email, ftp and newsgroups - for around eight hours. The service was back up and running by around 1am today, although the cableco has conceded that some punters may still be suffering problems this morning.
Telewest confirmed that its customers also experienced difficulties accessing email and personal webspace for around four hours. Although it's still investigating the matter, a spokesman acknowledged that the problems could be a result of the damaged cable. And Tiscali said it was unaffected by the incident, although some of its punters may have found accessing US-based sites slower than usual.
Changes and Updates for 4.8
• A new eBay pane has been added
• A new Dictionary pane has been added
• A new Quote pane has been added
• New custom image panes have been added
• An alarm has been added to the clock pane
• A calendar and clock display has been added to the new expanded part of the clock pane
• Alerts have been added to the calendar pane
• A clipboard pane that supports standard text and rich text has been added
• The weather channel feed has been repaired
• The stock watcher has been repaired
• The appearance of the weather channel and web search have been improved
• The appearance and functionality of the command line pane has been improved
• The volume control now has a context menu for accessing volume settings
• Bugs related to the bar not positioning itself when the screen resolution changes or the taskbar repositioning have been resolved
• Bugs related to the bar not hiding itself when a full screen app is detected have been resolved
• Control buttons and the option for continuous scrolling have been added to the news ticker
• An option to display the Mother Board Monitor display's temperatures in Fahrenheit has been added
Fixes for v0.981
• The network monitor on the Adv System Monitor has been repaired
• The BBC Weather pane expanding bug has been fixed
• The custom image pane bugs have been repaired
• The eBay pane has been fixed
• The pane maximize bug has been fixed
• The taskbar button right click bug has been fixed
• The font for dates and times can now be changed in config.exe if they are not displayed correctly
• The media players have been improved
• There is now an option to display the alarm settings by double clicking, and the calendar by single clicking for the clock pane
• Several visual enhancements have been made, including fading button effects and new themes.

I choked laughing
I am on NTL and had no problems (except with NTL's crappy proxy servers, but that has been a problem for days!)
EDIT: Just realised it was written by The Register. I should have expected it from them
Are Telewest's servers that borked that they route via the US.
/Raptor
Why would one cable cause this trouble? I thought the point of the internet and the way it works is to find a route even if some cables/servers are out??? or am i just being stupid?
If the servers that my NTL webspace is on are in the UK then why should FTP to my webspace be affected by this outage? Same for email.
Last edited by 23058 on 27 Nov 2003 - 16:05
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