Broadband outage: is it you or your provider?

A broadband outage and a dying router look identical from the sofa. The lights are wrong and nothing loads, and from inside the house there is no way to tell whether half your street is sitting in the same silence or whether it is only you. That one distinction decides who fixes it and how long you wait. It also decides whether you get anything back for the days you lost, which is the part almost nobody gets right.

What is a broadband outage?

An outage is a failure on your provider's network rather than inside your home, and it takes out a group of customers at once. Somebody has put a digger through a fibre. A cabinet has failed, a site has lost power, or planned engineering work has run over. You did not cause it, and nothing in your house will fix it.

A fault on your own line is the opposite: one address, usually the stretch between your home and the nearest bit of the network, and somebody has to come out and look at it. On the night it happens the two feel identical. That is why so many evenings get spent rebooting equipment that was never the problem.

Is it an outage or a fault on your own line?

Four things will usually tell you apart within ten minutes, and none of them requires any technical knowledge.

• Your neighbours. If the houses either side are down too, it is the network. A street or building group chat answers this faster than any support line.
• Every device, or one device. If the laptop is down but the phone works fine on the same wifi, the connection is alive and the problem is the laptop. If nothing anywhere can reach anything, look upstream.
• The lights on the router. Every manufacturer uses different colours, but the principle holds: a light showing the connection to the outside world is either steady, or it is flashing and hunting for something that is not there. The second one points away from your house.
• Whether it came back on its own. Outages tend to end abruptly and without you doing anything. A line fault usually stays broken until somebody visits.

If it turns out the connection is up but crawling, that is a different problem with a different route through it, and our guide to slow broadband covers how to work out whether the bottleneck is your wifi or your line.

How do you check if your broadband is down?

Start with your own provider's service status page, reached on mobile data rather than wifi. It is the only source that is actually reading the network you are connected to, and it is where a confirmed fault appears first with a rough estimate attached.

The public outage trackers are worth a glance and worth understanding. They plot how many people are complaining, not what the network is doing, so they are good at confirming that something big is happening and poor at telling you whether your particular street is affected. On a smaller network there may be too few customers for a tracker to register anything at all, which reads as "no problems reported" when there very much is one.

That is the honest weakness of buying from a smaller company. A national provider runs a status page staffed around the clock; a network with a few thousand customers may post updates to a social feed when somebody gets round to it. What you often get in return is a support line that a person answers in minutes rather than an hour, which matters more than the status page once you are actually trying to report something.

Report it, even when you are sure they already know

This is the part that costs people money. Nothing starts counting until you report the fault. If a broadband outage runs for three days and you sat through all three assuming the provider could see it on a dashboard, you are usually owed nothing, because the clock runs from your report rather than from the moment the service died.

Report it, and write down the reference number and the time. That reference is the only proof you have of when the fault was raised, and it is the first thing anyone asks for later.

The automatic compensation scheme that sits behind this is voluntary rather than universal. Ofcom lists the providers that have signed up to it, and they are largely the biggest names in the market, which means plenty of smaller networks are outside it. Being outside it does not leave you with no route, it just means nothing lands on your bill automatically. Our guide to broadband compensation covers who pays, what a total loss of service actually means, and what to do when your provider is not in the scheme.

What happens to your phone while the line is down

If your home phone runs over the broadband connection, which it now does for most households, it goes down with everything else. There is no separate copper line quietly holding the phone up any more, and a handset plugged into the back of the router is as dead as the wifi.

For most people that is an inconvenience solved by a mobile. For a household with no usable mobile signal, or somebody who relies on the landline to call for help, it is a genuine safety question, and it is one the rules already recognise. Ofcom sets out the protections providers have to offer as landlines move to digital, including a way of reaching the emergency services when the power or the connection is out. It is worth asking your provider what it offers before you need it rather than during a power cut. Our guide to broadband without a landline goes through what changes when the copper line goes.

What to do while you wait

Tethering to a phone is the quickest bridge, and most modern handsets will run a laptop and a TV between them for an evening without much drama. Watch the data allowance if it is not unlimited, because video will eat a monthly bundle in a couple of hours.

Resist buying equipment in the middle of an outage. Nothing you plug in at your end will fix a break further up, and the box bought at nine on a Tuesday evening is almost always still in its packaging on Wednesday when the service comes back on its own. The same goes for a factory reset of the router: restarting it once is sensible, wiping its settings is not.

If it drags on, or the same failure keeps returning, that becomes a complaint rather than a wait, and how to make a broadband complaint stick covers the route through it and where to go when your provider stops answering.

The thing worth doing before the next one

Outages are not a reason to avoid a smaller network. They are not rare on a large one either. Every provider in this market is pulling fibre through the same ground, past the same diggers and into the same power supplies, so the failure itself is not what separates them. What differs is what happens next. Is there a status page, does anyone answer the phone, and has the company signed up to pay when a repair runs long?

All three are answerable before you sign, in about two minutes on a provider's own page, rather than during your first bad week. It is a duller question than the headline speed. It is also the one you will remember on the evening the lights go orange.

Frequently asked questions

How long does a broadband outage usually last?

Most are back within a few hours, because most are caused by something a provider can fix or restart remotely. A cut fibre is the one that runs long, since it needs a crew at the break and sometimes a road closure to get to it. If your provider is still saying nothing useful after a full day, treat it as a fault that needs chasing rather than one that will clear itself.

Should I reset my router during an outage?

Restarting it once is worth doing, because it costs nothing and rules out the easiest cause. A full factory reset is not: it wipes your settings, and if the problem is on the network you will have lost your wifi name and password for nothing. Restart, wait, then leave it alone.

Can I get money back for an outage?

Sometimes, and only if you reported it. The automatic compensation scheme pays a daily amount for a total loss of service that is not fixed in time, but it is voluntary and mostly the larger providers have signed up. Our guide to broadband compensation covers who pays, how much and what to do if your provider is not in the scheme.

Does an outage count as a reason to leave my contract?

Not on its own. A single outage that gets fixed is a normal part of owning a broadband connection, however annoying it is. Repeated failures that your provider cannot resolve are a different matter, and that is a complaint you escalate rather than a contract you can simply walk away from.

Will a wifi booster help if my broadband is down?

No. A booster extends a signal that already exists, so if nothing is arriving at your router there is nothing for it to extend. Boosters solve a coverage problem inside the house, which is a different fault with a different fix.