Colt Technology Services outage: European customers hit by internet connectivity issues

Voice and data network provider Colt Technology Services has suffered a major outage, affecting users of its services across Europe.

The company confirmed, via its Twitter account at 10.16am today, that it was “investigating” an intermittent outage that is affecting IP services in several countries. The first tweet, confirming the outage, was issued about an hour before.

In a follow-up post, just before midday, the company described the event as a “network incident” that had affected internet access for a “limited number” of customers.

“Colt specialist teams have investigated and applied corrective actions,” the tweet added. “Colt is continuing to observe restoration of connectivity.”

Computer Weekly contacted Colt for further details on the cause and scale of the outage, in terms of the likely number of users affected, and was sent the following statement by the company's spokesperson: "Colt experienced a network incident that prevented access to and from the internet for a limited number of customers.

"Colt specialist teams have investigated and applied corrective actions to restore services. The root cause was a number of Colt’s peers received a high volume of advertised prefixes, thus triggering protection mechanisms that shut these sessions and interrupted Colt’s internet reach in Europe. The actions applied are permanent and we do not expect further interruptions," the spokesperson concluded.

According to the Downtime Detector website, the outage began at around 9am on Wednesday 24 January, with users reporting internet connectivity issues in the UK, Brussels, Paris and Milan, for example.

In an email, shared with Computer Weekly, sent to customers of a third-party managed service provider that uses Colt’s network to provide internet connectivity to its customers, the outage is said to be affecting the “majority of its services” in Europe.

“[Colt] has experienced a major outage which has impacted the majority of their services in Europe,” the email states. “We are currently working with them to determine the scale of the outage and how long they expect to be down for.”

After the outage, the company has come under fire from users via Twitter for being slow to update them on the status of their services, and criticising the firm for not picking up calls on its support line or responding to emails.

Colt’s website claims the firm’s services are used by more than 25,000 customers in 206 cities, with its network spanning four continents and 28 countries.