Form time to time we get a domestic broadband outage, but whenever it occurs, I’m never quite sure whether it’s a problem at my end, or with the exchange. On such occasions, I have a bookmarked link on my phone to the BT broadband status/issues page: http://btbusiness.custhelp.com/app/service_status

Digging around last night, I found a site that links to similar pages for a wide variety of ISPs (though it doesn’t go as far as scraping the status updates – it just embeds the relevants pages in an iframe): Netstatus.

Some of the other utility companies – gas, water, electricity – also provide status pages where you can find information about planned as well as unscheduled outages. Here’s what I’ve found so far:

Electricity
Eon-UK Power Cut map (Broken link – redirects to http://www.central-networks.co.uk/; power cuts link on that page just goes round the loop too… However, Powercuts.info seems to be pulling this data somehow? I *think* that site is only regional at the moment – would be good if it could start to offer national coverage…?;-)

Electricity NorthWest – Power cuts information (also Power outage map)

There’s also data on recent electricity demand from the National Grid: National Grid electricity data: realtime demand

Gas

None found?

Water
South West Water – Live

Thames Water – Live

Yorkshire Water – In Your Area -includes incidents, roadworks…

So here’s something for a hack day: compile a list of status update pages, build a set of scrapers and/or a meta-API, and publish a critical infrastructure status map/app…

If you have links to any other UK utility status pages, please post a link below and I’ll try to pull a comprehensive list together.

I haven’t yet looked to see which of the utilities have Twitter accounts or Facebook pages, and if so whether they are used to provide live status updates. If you know more, please let me know via a comment:-)

[Read More...]