Your broadband is down — what to do, in order

Work through these in order. The first step decides everything else — most of what follows is a waste of your time if it turns out to be an area fault.

1. Is it just you, or the whole street?

Answer this before you touch anything. If it is an area fault there is nothing at home to fix, and every minute spent restarting the router is a minute wasted.

Ask a neighbour on the same provider. This is the fastest and most reliable check there is, and it beats every website. A knock on a door or a text message settles it in under a minute.

Then phone your provider. This matters more than it sounds: every one of the big providers has moved its service-status check onto a web page or an app, and none of them publishes an automated status line. Those checkers are useless to you right now. A phone call is not.

Provider	Number	When
BT	0330 1234 150 (150 from a BT mobile)	Mon–Fri 8am–9pm, weekends 8am–8pm
EE	0330 123 1105 (150 from an EE mobile)	Mon–Fri 8am–9pm, Sat–Sun 8am–8pm
TalkTalk	0345 172 0088	Weekdays 9am–7pm, Sat 9am–6pm, closed Sunday
Plusnet	0330 1239 123	8am–8pm, every day
Vodafone	0333 304 0191 (191 from a Vodafone mobile)	Mon–Fri 8am–10pm, Sat–Sun 8am–8pm
Virgin Media	0345 454 1111 (150 from a Virgin phone)	Hours not published
NOW	0330 332 3050	Hours not published
Community Fibre	0800 082 0770	Hours not published
Sky	Sky publishes no phone number	Its checker issues one at the end

Every number was taken from that provider’s own website on 3 August 2026. Several that circulate on comparison sites and forums are wrong, so we publish only what we could confirm — and Sky genuinely does not print one anywhere.

Or send a text, which works on a signal too weak for anything else. BT: text HELP to 61998. EE: text HELP to 66033. Plusnet: text HELP to 07800008121. Standard rates apply.

If you have enough signal for a web page, our is my broadband down? checker links straight to each provider’s official status page and says what it will ask for first.

The verdict

A neighbour is down too — stop. It is an area fault. Note the time it started, report it once so the compensation clock starts, and skip to step 4.

Only you — carry on to step 2.

After a power cut or a storm

Usually this resolves itself. Give it time — the router and the white Openreach box both have to re-establish a connection after power returns, which takes several minutes on its own.

Our rule of thumb, not an official standard: if the power has been back for an hour and the broadband has not, treat it as a fault and report it. Check the white Openreach box has power too; it has its own plug and is easy to miss.

2. Look at the lights before you touch anything

The router’s light is the fastest free diagnostic you have.

• A steady light in the maker’s normal colour — usually white, green or blue — means it is connected.
• Red or orange usually means no connection to your provider.
• The Wi-Fi light tells you nothing about the internet. It only says your home network is broadcasting.

For your exact model: BT, EE, Sky, Virgin Media, or router lights in general.

One trap worth knowing: on a fibre line, check the white Openreach box on the wall as well. It has its own power supply and its own lights, and a dead one looks exactly like a dead router from the sofa. What the lights on the white Openreach box mean covers it.

3. Restart it once, properly

Once. That word is doing the work in this section.

1. Power the router off at the socket.
2. Wait a full sixty seconds.
3. Power it back on.
4. Leave it completely alone for up to ten minutes.

Restarting repeatedly during the resync is the most common way people extend their own outage. Some lines also apply a stability penalty after repeated drops, so the connection you get back can be slower than the one you lost. How to restart your router properly explains why the pause matters.

Then four physical checks, and no more:

• The broadband cable is seated in the right socket and is not damaged.
• Any microfilter is fitted, on an older phone-line connection.
• You are plugged into the master socket, not an extension.
• On fibre, the Ethernet lead between the white box and the router is secure at both ends.

4. Report it today, even if you keep trying

Here is the part almost nobody tells you: the compensation clock runs from when you report the fault, not from when it broke. So report it today, even if you fully intend to keep troubleshooting this evening. It costs you nothing and it can be worth a great deal.

Under Ofcom’s automatic compensation scheme, at the rates in force from 1 April 2026:

• £10.34 for each calendar day a total loss of service stays broken, once it is still not fixed two full working days after you report it.
• £32.31 for a missed engineer appointment, or one cancelled with less than 24 hours’ notice.
• £6.46 per calendar day if a new service does not start on the promised date.
• It must be credited to your bill within 30 calendar days. It is automatic and you should not have to claim — but people do miss out, so keep your own record.

Two exclusions, and both matter. Nothing is due if the fault started inside your own premises, and nothing is due if you delayed the repair by turning down offered appointments. Ten providers take part: BT, EE, Hyperoptic, Plusnet, Sky (including NOW), TalkTalk, Utility Warehouse, Virgin Media, Vodafone and Zen.

See automatic compensation explained or work out what you are owed.

Have this ready when you call: when it started to the hour, the light colour and pattern, what you have already tried, and whether neighbours are affected. Ask for a fault reference number and write it down.

5. Get yourself online while you wait

Your phone can share its connection. The steps are written out here rather than linked, because you cannot follow a link on a device with no connection.

iPhone. Open Settings and tap Personal Hotspot — if it is not there, tap Mobile first, then Personal Hotspot. Turn on Allow Others to Join. Apple gives both routes because the row sits in different places on different devices.

Android. There is no single path, because the wording genuinely differs by manufacturer. On a Google Pixel it is Network & internet → Hotspot & tethering → Wi-Fi hotspot. On a Samsung it is Connections → Mobile Hotspot and Tethering → Mobile Hotspot. On anything else, open Settings and look for Hotspot or Tethering — that word is the constant. Google’s own Android help declines to publish one path for all phones, which tells you something.

Two things worth knowing before you start:

• Turning the hotspot on switches your phone’s own Wi-Fi off, so it will stop trying to reconnect to your dead home network.
• Turn off automatic cloud photo backup and system updates on the devices you tether first. Those, plus video calls and streaming, are what empty a data allowance fastest. A laptop that decides to download an operating system update over your hotspot can cost you a month’s data in an afternoon.

No mobile signal either? See fix mobile signal. And be aware that Wi-Fi calling will not help, because it needs the broadband that is currently down — this catches a lot of people out.

If your phone service runs over your broadband — a digital landline, which most UK homes now have — then your landline is down too, and you cannot call 999 from it. If anyone in the home uses a telecare alarm or a medical pendant, that is a safety issue rather than an inconvenience: see will my alarm still work after the landline switch? and the landline switch-off explained.

If it drags on

Ofcom’s most recent service-quality figures — published May 2025, covering 2024 — found that half of all total-loss-of-service faults were fixed within a day, and 88% within a week, down from 91% the year before. Two things follow from that. About one fault in eight takes longer than a week, so you are not being unreasonable. And where an engineer was needed, faults took on average two days longer.

Ofcom has flagged that some fault figures in that report are being restated after one provider resubmitted its data in April 2026. The overall picture above is what Ofcom currently publishes; we will refresh it when the corrected report appears.

• After a few days: chase it, quote your fault reference, and ask for the estimated fix date in writing.
• After a week: raise a formal complaint. You are now outside what Ofcom reports as normal.
• Unresolved after six weeks: you can take it to alternative dispute resolution — reduced from eight weeks for complaints raised on or after 8 April 2026 — or sooner if you are given a deadlock letter. The two schemes are the Communications Ombudsman and CISAS; which one covers you depends on your provider, and they will tell you which.

How to complain about your broadband walks through it, and the complaint letter generator writes it for you.

Before the next one

Not today — today you just need it back. But once it is fixed, three things make the next one far less painful.

• Save your provider’s number to your phone now. Free, takes ten seconds, and it is the most useful thing on this page once the panic is over.
• A 4G or 5G backup connection, if you work from home, live somewhere with repeat outages, or have a phone line that runs over broadband. Some routers do it automatically — BT calls it Hybrid Connect, EE calls it Connectivity Backup, and that is what a steady purple or white hub light means. See backup internet options and is 4G or 5G home broadband right for me?.
• A small UPS on the router, and on the white Openreach box, keeps you online through short power cuts and keeps a digital landline alive.

→ Use the is my broadband down? checker