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Colt Technology Services experienced an intermittent IP-services outage on January 24, 2018, disrupting internet connectivity for customers in several European locations. Colt said the incident occurred after peers received an unusually high volume of advertised network prefixes, triggering protection mechanisms that shut down peering sessions and interrupted European internet reachability.
This is a historical incident, not a current outage alert. Colt’s current status page reports its platforms, systems and network infrastructure as operational as of the latest available check.
What happened during the Colt outage?
According to Computer Weekly’s contemporaneous report, Colt acknowledged an intermittent outage affecting IP services in several countries on Wednesday, January 24, 2018.
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The customer-facing symptom was loss of, or intermittent access to, the public internet through Colt’s IP services. User reports cited in the coverage placed the start at approximately 9:00 a.m. local time. Colt’s first reported public acknowledgement came at about 10:16 a.m., followed by an update shortly before noon.
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Reported complaints came from the United Kingdom and locations including Brussels, Paris and Milan. These were examples of affected locations, not a complete official list of countries, cities, circuits or network nodes.
What caused the connectivity problem?
Colt attributed the incident to a routing and peering problem. In the company’s explanation:
- Some of Colt’s peers received a high volume of advertised network prefixes.
- Protection mechanisms reacted by shutting down the affected peering sessions.
- The session shutdown interrupted internet reachability through Colt’s European network.
- Colt applied corrective actions and monitored connectivity as service returned.
A prefix is a block of IP addresses announced as reachable through a particular network. Internet providers exchange these reachability announcements with one another, commonly using the Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP. Networks use safeguards to limit the damage from unexpectedly large or abnormal route announcements. If those safeguards close a peering session, traffic that depends on that connection may no longer reach some destinations.
The specific incident explanation remains Colt’s account. The available reporting does not identify the individual peers, the number of prefixes, the protection thresholds, the exact BGP messages, or whether the announcements were erroneous, accidental or malicious. It also does not establish that one particular operator caused the event.
How long did the Colt outage last?
There is no verified single restoration time covering every customer and circuit. Colt said specialist teams had investigated the problem, applied corrective actions and were observing connectivity as it returned. The company also said it did not expect further interruptions after the changes were implemented.
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Because the incident was described as intermittent and customers used different services and locations, recovery may not have occurred simultaneously everywhere. The available coverage supports describing the outage as a same-day incident with restoration under way, but not assigning one exact duration to all affected customers.
How many customers were affected?
The reporting does not provide an authoritative customer count. Colt described the incident as affecting a limited number of customers. Separately, an email from a third-party managed-service provider described the problem as affecting the majority of that provider’s services in Europe.
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Outbyte PC Repair FREEClear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsFree Scan →Outbyte Driver Updater FREEScan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →Those statements are not necessarily contradictory. Colt’s description uses the number of Colt customers as its denominator. The provider’s message uses the proportion of its own services that depended on Colt. A disruption to a large share of one provider’s services could therefore affect only a limited portion of Colt’s overall customer base.
Colt said at the time that it served more than 25,000 customers in 206 cities, with a network spanning four continents and 28 countries. That figure provides historical company context, not a measurement of the outage’s size.
Was the 2018 Colt outage a cyberattack?
There is no evidence in the available coverage that the January 2018 incident was a cyberattack. The reported explanation concerns route advertisements, peering sessions and automated protection mechanisms. The report does not describe ransomware, unauthorised access, data theft or malicious route hijacking.
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Readers should also avoid confusing this event with a separate Colt cyber incident reported in 2025. That later incident affected internal systems and support platforms, including Colt Online and the Voice API platform, according to IT Pro and an 8×8 customer advisory. It was not evidence about the cause of the 2018 European internet-connectivity outage.
Which services were affected?
The verified description concerns Colt’s IP services and internet access. It does not establish that Colt’s entire product portfolio failed.
In particular, the available report does not prove that every Colt circuit, private WAN, private line, cloud connection or voice service was unavailable. A public-internet transit or peering incident can affect internet reachability while separately provisioned private connectivity remains operational.
That distinction matters for enterprises and downstream connectivity providers. “Internet access was disrupted” is not the same claim as “the entire network was down.” Service symptoms can also vary: some destinations may be reachable while others are not, and inbound and outbound connectivity may recover at different times. Those are technically plausible outcomes, but the available report does not document them for every affected customer.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How did Colt respond?
Colt’s reported response had two distinct parts:
- Technical remediation: specialist teams investigated, corrective actions were applied, and connectivity was monitored as it returned.
- Incident communication: some customers criticised Colt for being slow to provide status information and reported difficulty reaching support by telephone or email.
These should be assessed separately. A provider can restore network service while still communicating inadequately during the incident. Conversely, a status update does not itself demonstrate that every customer’s circuit has recovered.
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What remains unknown?
The available reporting does not establish:
- the exact number of affected customers;
- a complete official list of countries, cities or circuits;
- the individual peers involved;
- the number of prefixes received;
- the precise protection thresholds or BGP messages;
- whether the route advertisements were accidental, erroneous or malicious;
- one universal outage duration; or
- whether services outside public-internet connectivity were affected.
Those limits are important because a historical outage report should not turn a carrier’s high-level explanation into a more specific root-cause claim than the evidence supports.
What the incident means for network-dependent businesses
The event illustrates why organisations should evaluate more than a carrier’s advertised geographic footprint. When internet reachability depends on a carrier’s peering and transit arrangements, route-protection controls can become a point of failure if sessions are withdrawn or shut down.
Enterprise customers and managed-service providers reviewing similar risks should ask their providers about:
- diverse transit and peering paths;
- automatic failover and the destinations it actually covers;
- separation between public-internet access and private connectivity;
- route-filtering and route-validation practices;
- incident escalation contacts outside the affected service path; and
- how restoration updates, service credits and post-incident reports are handled.
These are resilience and vendor-management considerations, not evidence that every Colt customer experienced the same impact in 2018.
Bottom line on the Colt Technology Services outage
The January 24, 2018 Colt incident was a genuine European IP-connectivity outage. Colt said an unusually high volume of advertised prefixes received by peers triggered protection mechanisms, which shut down peering sessions and interrupted internet reachability. Corrective actions were applied and service was reportedly restored the same day, although the available coverage does not provide one exact end time for every customer.
The incident should not be described as a total Colt network failure or a confirmed cyberattack. Nor should it be confused with the separate 2025 cyber incident involving Colt’s internal systems.
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