Survey Claims 17 Million UK People Hit by Broadband Outages in 2023

A new Uswitch commissioned Opinium survey of 2,000 UK adults, which was conducted earlier this month, has claimed that 17 million people have “lost their broadband connection or had it drop out” in the last 12 months and the average number of such incidents experienced (i.e. those lasting longer than 3 hours) came out as 33.

Broadband ISP outages were given as the top reason for these prolonged disconnections. Over half (52%) of broadband customers cited an outage from a provider, followed by power cuts (42%), planned maintenance to external cables (18%) and router issues (17%). But it may not be particularly fair to mix up broadband outages with those caused by local power cuts, particularly as the end-user may be able to resolve those themselves (e.g. battery backup).

Meanwhile, respondents living in Nottingham were found to be the most likely to experience an outage, with 43% doing so in 2023 and this was followed by Liverpool (39%), Brighton (38%) and Plymouth (37%). Those in Glasgow were least likely to be hit by outages (28%). On the other hand, we can’t really build much of a reliable UK-wide picture from a survey with such a small sample size.

The same survey also queried which day of the week respondents were most likely to experience an outage, which saw Friday and Wednesday coming joint top with 12% of the vote each, followed by Saturday (9%), Thursday (11%), Tuesday (9%), Monday (7%) and Sunday (6%). But it should be said that a lot of outages are likely to go unnoticed (e.g. those that occur while you’re sleeping or out of the house).

Similarly, the most frequent time of the day for such outages to occur was found to be 11am (10%), while 6pm, 7pm, 9pm, 3pm, 2pm and 10am each scored 8%. Finally, 10% of respondents said they would switch broadband provider if they weren’t within contract.

The results are radically different from when Uswitch last asked a similar question only a few months ago (here), when the survey found 21.7 million people had experienced “broadband outages” of 3 or more hours over the last year. Put another way, it’s wise not to read too much into surveys based off such a small sample size, as the margin for error appears to be quite significant.