Sky internet down: Broadband network hit by outage as websites fail to load for some users

Problems appear to be particular prevalent in Cornwall

This May 26, 2014 photo shows an ethernet connector (KAREN BLEIER/AFP/Getty Images)

Sky internet has been hit by network problems, leaving people unable to load websites.

The company said that it was working to fix the problems, which came as many people are working from home as part of the UK's lockdown.

Issues appeared to be particularly prevalent in Cornwall, which Sky said had been traced to a technical problem.

"After investigation by the support teams we are now able to confirm that there is a multiple exchange outage in the area," it wrote on Twitter. "We are working hard to put a fix in place."

The company responded to users over the social networking site to apologise for issues and ask them to keep an eye on Sky's status page, which allows customers to check whether their services are online.

Network monitoring company ThousandEyes said that reports of global outages had increased 42 per cent since mid-February, but that online services were largely staying stable despite the influx of new and additional traffic.

“While outages don’t follow a predictable trend there has been a notable increase in traffic due across the Internet and to core business, media and social platforms in recent weeks, due to changes in working, and living, patterns," said Ian waters, ThousandEyes' director of product marketing. "This doesn’t necessarily cause more outages of itself, and there are multiple reasons an application or service can experience an outage.

"For example, last week, we noticed that many users were unable to reach a major business collaboration application because some of its domains were not resolving to an IP address. While the disruption lasted approximately 20 minutes the service itself was still operational, but simply not findable due to a DNS resolution failure.

“During the current COVID-19 global pandemic, despite the increased load due to the sudden influx in remote workers, remote learners, and overall general increase of Internet use, the Internet is thus far remaining relatively stable."

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