London Hit by Major Community Fibre Outage, VPNs and DNS Tweaks Offer Workarounds

• Over 10,000 Community Fibre users have reported a loss to their network.
• The major London-based internet outage has led some customers to devise workarounds.
• Some disgruntled users have taken to social media to complain.

A major outage has hit Community Fibre, London’s largest fibre network, with over 10,000 disgruntled customers reporting a loss to service.

The network, which is used in over one million London homes, has not specified what has caused the issue, leading some customers to find ways to create their own ways to get back online.

Community Fibre Down

On Monday, Feb. 17, just after 12 p.m., reports of internet outages from over 10,000 customers began appearing on DownDetector .

Affected users have reported being kicked offline from all of their devices.

A Community Fibre spokesperson: “We are aware that some of our customers are experiencing network outages this afternoon.

“Our specialist network delivery team are looking into this with the highest priority, and we expect to see these network issues resolved shortly.”

Customers Find Workarounds

Some users have been sharing ways to get back online quicker.

On Reddit , some users said they had tweaked the network’s public DNS setting to get devices back online.

One user wrote: “It’s the DNS service that’s down but that means no one can resolve names (which makes it appear everything is down). Logging into the router and setting a different DNS such as 8.8.8.8 fixes it…”

Others have been restoring to VPNs to get their service back with varying degrees of success.

A “lucky” user shared that they managed to get back online through a VPN logged in to a U.K. server.

However, others have claimed VPNs are not currently working for them.

Users Complaining on Social Media

The outage has led many users to vent their frustration online, specifically with the lack of reported communication and customer service.

One user wrote on a Reddit thread : “What really p****d me off is the lack of customer service about it.

“Nothing on their website and their phone lines are just engaged. The only way to fix it was by reading the comments on DownDetector.”

However, another user responded: “I got through a few minutes ago. Poor guy sounded so exasperated as he explained it was an outage affecting all their customers.”