YouFibre guide
Is YouFibre down? Live outage tracker
YouFibre is the retail arm of Netomnia, one of the fastest-growing alternative full-fibre networks in the country. It runs its own fibre end to end rather than Openreach's, with symmetric speeds up to 8Gbps, and it sells on a simple promise: a fixed price for the whole contract with no mid-contract rises. That own-network setup shapes its outages, because when YouFibre has a problem it is either a local fibre fault on the line into your home, or an issue on the Netomnia core that can affect a wider area at once.
YouFibre problems are one of two kinds.
The first is a local fibre fault, on the connection into your property or street. As a newer network still building out, the most common cause is civils work: a contractor cutting a cable, or a fault during installation in your area. These tend to be local, hitting a street or a pocket of homes, and they resolve once an engineer attends.
The second is a Netomnia core or network incident, which can take out a wider area at once because everyone shares that infrastructure. There is no single famous nationwide YouFibre outage on record, which fits a network still relatively young and regional, but a core fault behaves the same as on any provider: nothing to fix at your end, fixed centrally.
YouFibre's headline promise is fixed pricing: the price you sign up to is locked for the whole fixed term, with no annual CPI rise and no mid-contract increase. That removes the most common reason people want out of a contract, so it is worth remembering before you go looking for an exit.
On speed, YouFibre has not signed Ofcom's Voluntary Code of Practice on Broadband Speeds. It runs its own minimum-speed guarantee instead: if your speed falls below the guaranteed level at peak time and it cannot fix it, you can leave within a set window. Check the current terms, because they are YouFibre's own, not the Ofcom code.
For a total loss of service, Ofcom's automatic compensation scheme pays £10.34 a day beyond two full working days, but it only covers providers that have signed up, and not every altnet has, so confirm whether YouFibre is in the scheme.
YouFibre runs its own support and engineers on the Netomnia network. To move a fault along, run a speed test on a wired ethernet connection and report the result if it is below your guaranteed speed, or flag packet loss on a wired connection, both of which point at a line fault rather than wifi. A fault on the fibre into your home is YouFibre's to fix.
If a fault goes unresolved, you can escalate to alternative dispute resolution. YouFibre 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 YouFibre issues you a deadlock letter.
YouFibre and Netomnia only cover part of the country, so your alternatives depend on your exact address. Where YouFibre reaches, there is often Openreach full fibre and sometimes another altnet or Virgin's cable too. The deal finder above shows which networks actually serve your home, not the "up to" figures in the adverts, so you can compare like for like.