THE sudden loss of BT broadband services to large number of customers this week should teach a lesson to any businesses affected, an IT expert believes.

Rob Rutherford, chief executive of Bournemouth-based business IT firm QuoStar, tweeted during the loss of service: “If you are a business affected by the BT outage – shame on you.

“'ADSL is for home users.”

ADSL, asymmetric digital subscriber line, is the data communications technology slanted towards domestic users, as it allows faster downloads than uploads.

BT has apologised after swathes of customers had their broadband temporarily cut off on Tuesday afternoon.

The provider’s website also crashed and many customers reported the customer service line was down.

A BT spokesman confirmed the service problem but said there was “no evidence” of a “malicious attack”.

Mr Rutherford told the Daily Echo: “Broadband services in the main do not have any service level agreement against them in terms of what happens if it fails.

“They’re not really fit for business purposes because there’s no real comeback against the provider if they’re down.”

He added: “Even with these service level agreements, firms still need to not rely on one provider.

“If your business really relies on connecting to the internet, which 99 per cent of businesses do, you need to have more than one provider.”

“ASDL isn’t really fit for purpose anyway. If you’re going for ASDL, make sure you’ve got a back-up from another provider but make sure that provider has access to your building.”

Some providers shared infrastructure, so having two providers using the same network was not an effective back-up, he pointed out.

He said the key was considering the risks in advance.

“It’s about taking accountability for your business and not thinking you can offload that bit to other people,” he added.

A BT spokesman said “large numbers of customers” experienced “temporary issues with their broadband services”.

He said almost every customer was reconnected within two hours of the problem starting.

“We apologise to any affected customers for the inconvenience,” he added.

“There is no evidence at this stage to suggest that we were subject to a malicious attack.”