Problems at Bletchley have prevented 70,000 BT business customers from getting broadband access to the Internet

Tens of thousands of businesses with a BT broadband connection were knocked offline on Friday when BT's network suffered a major crash.

The outage occurred at 12.30pm on Friday, and prevented 70,000 firms across the UK from accessing the Internet. A BT spokesman said that by 4pm around two-thirds had been reconnected, with over 20,000 customers still waiting for their connectivity to be restored.

Dial-up Internet users were also hit, but they should only have experienced a temporary connection failure.

The crash occurred in a network switching centre at Bletchley, near Milton Keynes, at one of several sites that handles Internet traffic for BT Retail.

According to BT, the firms affected were those that happened to be connected through the Bletchley facility rather than another part of BT's infrastructure at the time of the crash.

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