UK biz ISP Entanet goes titsup, 'broke' a bit of Blighty's internet

Brit internet and communications provider Entanet is slowing bringing its systems back to life today after they metaphorically keeled over last night.

The Shropshire-based supplier of broadband, leased lines, telecoms and more has offered scant detail about its network outage, much to the chagrin of some of its biz and ISP punters - who took to Twitter to moan about the service going titsup.

Entanet's Richard Partridge said in a post on Entanet's website:

Between approximately 18.30 we began work to resolve the issue and by 20.45 all but two sites were reinstated successfully. The remaining sites were restored by approximately 21.30 and shortly after midnight. A detailed report is being prepared and will be published by 17.00 today. We apologise for any inconvenience this issue may have caused.

However, anecdotal reports suggest the cock-up isn't quite over yet, with some saying that the service has once again fallen over this morning. Entanet claims to have a "resilient national network you can trust", which led to some tweeting that statement on Thursday evening while quipping "not tonight".

Click to see the tweet

Another Entanet customer said on the microblogging site: "Looks like @entanetnoc broke some of the UK internet for a couple of hours this evening. @coreixnet was unreachable."

Managed hosting and cloud services provider Coreixnet was a lot more talky with its users than Entanet (aka ENTA). It said:

1. At approximately 5.45pm we noticed an inability to contact certain locations and started to investigate. 2. We disconnected LINX, LONAP and ENTA within 5 minutes as it appeared that there was an issue with one of these providers. 3. This did not solve this issue as anticipated and issue became worse. 4. At approximately 6.30pm the ENTA edge router to which we connect went down and full connectivity was reinstated (we where not connected to it at this point per point 2).

It is our belief at this point in time that ENTA suffered from a serious route leak on their systems and was falsely advertising other companies [sic] routes. This caused the internet in general to send traffic to ENTA rather than Coreix.

We are awaiting a response from ENTA to confirm this was the case. We will report back further as soon as we receive further information and clarification. Our apologies for the inconvenience caused by this issue.

The Register asked Entanet for an official statement on what went wrong. We'll update the story if the company gets back to us. ®