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A new Uswitch commissioned Opinium survey of 2,000 UK adults, which was conducted between 31st October and 4th November 2025, has claimed that 41% of respondents experienced at least one loss of broadband connectivity in the past 12 months and “15 million Brits” (67%) experienced outages lasting for three hours or more.
The survey goes on to claim that internet outages totalled 238.7 million hours in the past year, which is said to be costing the UK economy an estimated £1.4bn in lost work hours. Some 21% of those affected said they are having to suffer through 3 hours or longer outages “more than once a week“. Problems at the broadband provider were given as the top reason for prolonged outages by 37% of respondents, while 33% blamed it on power cuts and 27% attributed it to their router not working.
Furthermore, 49% of adults rely on their home Wi-Fi for work, and for home workers who have been affected by outages it is estimated to have cost them an average of £46.40, with 12% losing over £100 annually. Some 18% even said they were unable to work as a result and 28% of those who use a home internet connection for work purposes had to increase their working hours to offset the downtime.
In terms of the regional results. Edinburgh and London take the spot as the UK’s outage capital, with 48% of residents suffering disconnection. But this falls to 18% in Belfast, followed by Cardiff (30%), Brighton (31%), and Sheffield (32%). But the sample size of this survey really is too small to be credible on this front.
The UK Top 5 Outage Capitals
(highest % of residents experiencing an outage)
Edinburgh (48%)
London (48%)
Bristol (45%)
Norwich (43%)
Liverpool (43%)
Finally, 78% of those who experienced an outage said they did not receive compensation and 9% had their compensation request denied. But in fairness, Ofcom’s scheme for Automatic Compensation only kicks in for service outages that last longer than 2 working days, which is rare (most outages only last a few minutes or hours).
Naturally, we have a few comments on this, not least of which is the fact that we haven’t actually seen any hard independent data evidence to corroborate the above findings (in fairness, it’s a difficult thing to study with any accuracy). Opinions surveys are of course also best taken with a pinch of salt, since they don’t always reflect reality.
In addition, more reliable full fibre (FTTP) networks have grown in both coverage and take-up in recent years, while more people are now back working from an office (i.e. fewer people are now at home to spot when outages occur). Not to mention that it may be considered a bit misleading to term the overall result as a “broadband outage” when you’re also including power cuts into the mix; something ends users could often mitigate with their own backups, if so desired.
The other issue typically stems from whether a “broadband outage” is actually caused by an internet provider or is instead an issue within the home, such as a local network, viruses / hacker, router, Wi-Fi or end-user device problem. Surveys like this often can’t correctly distinguish the difference, which tends to result in everything being blamed on the broadband connection, while the wider picture may be more complex.
However, modern broadband networks can certainly still be disrupted in all sorts of different ways, such as via weather damage (flooding, fallen trees etc.), third-party street works cutting through cables, fires, power cuts at an exchange / data centre and deeper faults within an ISP’s network (e.g. hardware failure, routing / peering or DNS mistakes etc.). Most of these are quickly resolved, but others can take days or even longer (complex incidents in remote rural areas are usually slower to resolve).