BT guide
Is BT down? Live outage tracker
BT is the UK's biggest broadband provider, with more than eight million homes on its network, and that network is Openreach: the same national fibre and copper that also carries EE, Plusnet, Sky, TalkTalk and most other big names. BT Group owns Openreach but runs it as a separate, equal-access business, so when BT goes down it is one of two very different things. Either there is a fault on the Openreach line into your home, or something has broken in BT's own systems, the core, DNS, email and voice platforms it runs on top of the network. Knowing which is which tells you whether to wait, report it or stop bothering.
A BT problem is almost always one of two kinds, and they call for completely different responses.
The first is a line fault on the Openreach connection to your property. These are usually local, hitting a single home or a postcode area, and they come from a cabinet or exchange problem, a damaged line or an FTTP fault. The board above and your neighbours settle it fast: if it is only you, it is your line or your kit; if the street is dark, it is a local Openreach fault, and that is BT's to fix.
The second, and the one that makes national news, is a BT-side incident on the systems BT runs itself. BT's own DNS servers and email platform have gone down repeatedly over the past year, taking out browsing or mail for people whose actual broadband line was working fine. The biggest recent example was the UK-wide voice outage of July 2025, a software fault on the shared BT and EE core that left customers unable to make or receive calls for more than a day, briefly including 999, and prompted an Ofcom investigation. When something like that hits, there is nothing to fix at your end; it comes back when BT fixes it.
BT signed Ofcom's Voluntary Code of Practice on Broadband Speeds, so it has to quote you a minimum guaranteed download speed at sign-up. If your line consistently sits below that minimum and BT cannot restore it within 30 days of your fault report, you can leave the contract penalty-free, with any TV and call bundles included.
That is the guaranteed minimum, which is usually well below the headline speed you were sold, so check the number on your contract before you escalate.
For a total loss of service, Ofcom's automatic compensation scheme pays £10.34 for each day you are completely offline beyond two full working days from the moment you report the fault, credited to your bill automatically. Mid-contract price rises on BT deals taken out after 17 January 2025 must also be set out in pounds and pence before you sign, so any rise above the figure you agreed is itself grounds to leave without penalty.
BT's support runs a scripted diagnostic, and the way to move it along is to bring evidence it can act on. Run a speed test on a wired ethernet connection, not wifi, and if the result is below the guaranteed minimum on your contract, say so plainly: that moves the case from general support into a proper fault investigation. Packet loss on a wired connection is even better, because it points at a line or sync fault BT's tools can often confirm remotely and book an engineer against.
If you have been round that loop and BT still cannot fix it, you can escalate to alternative dispute resolution. BT is a member of the Communications Ombudsman, the independent scheme, and you can take a complaint there after eight weeks without resolution, or sooner if BT gives you a deadlock letter.
One thing worth knowing if BT keeps letting you down: because BT runs on Openreach, switching to another Openreach provider like Sky, TalkTalk or EE puts you on the very same physical line, so it will not help with a line fault, though it will if the trouble was BT's own core or service. For a genuinely different network you want Virgin's cable or a full-fibre altnet, where one exists. The address-aware deal finder above shows which networks actually reach your home, not the "up to" figures in the adverts, so you can tell a real change from a like-for-like move.