BT has blamed a faulty router for knocking its network offline yesterday, leaving hundreds of thousands of customers without the internet.

The telecoms giant apologised for the failure, which began at around 2pm yesterday afternoon. Customers across the country were unable to get online, with reports of the outage affecting London, Birmingham, Sheffield and Glasgow.

In a statement yesterday evening, it said: "BT is confident that services have been fully restored following an outage that affected several hundred thousand customers earlier today.

"A faulty router was to blame for the outage and we apologise to those customers who were affected."

Earlier this week, BT posted its best quarter results in seven years. Profit before tax soared by 24 per cent to £862m on revenue up three per cent to £4.6bn compared with the same three months last year.

Ofcom is expected to decide whether or not to recommend spinning out BT's broadband division, Openreach.

More than 100 MPs have called for a separation of Openreach, claiming the company has substantially failed to deliver on its rural broadband commitments.

However, in its quarterly earnings call, chief exec Gavin Patterson said the company had been "very disappointed" by the report. ®