BT Broadband down this afternoon

BT Broadband is down this afternoon. A power failure in Birmingham saw customers lose their broadband connection around lunchtime, although BT reckons it's now fixed in most areas.

The power cut happened at a major exchange in Brum, and customers began noticing problems around 1pm. Tweets show that Internet connections have been affected as far afield as Brighton, on the south coast, Cornwall, in the south-west, and Llanwrda, which is in Wales or somewhere. Even Northern Ireland was affected.

It's an astonishingly widespread failure for an issue in a specific location, which makes you wonder just how good BT's backup systems are. You can see any current issues at BT's status page, or call the status hotline on 0800 169 0199.

The official BT customer service Twitter feed reports that things should be back to normal, and suggests that if you still have problems to reboot your router. Some areas are still suffering problems, including Poplar in East London.

We haven't noticed any problems here at CNET UK, but that's because we have a triple-layered Internet connection with built-in threat detection and extra redundancy protection to ensure nothing stops the flow of technology news and reviews.

Management had the backup systems installed after the last time we lost our Web connection -- after 31 minutes cut off from news about Android updates and Facebook arguments about Nokia, the team had mostly turned feral.

How's your broadband? You can see speeds across the country in Ofcom's handy broadband map. Did you notice any problems today, and what did you do to fill the time away from Facebook work? If it's still broken, how are you reading this? Tell us all about it down in the comments or on our Facebook page.