On Saturday 15th February 2025, thousands of BT Internet users in the UK were impacted by an issue affecting their DNS servers (the Internet's equivalent of Sat-Nav). As reported by Birmingham Live, this meant that some websites, including Caterbook, ICR Touch Office and many others were unable to be reached by users of BT's Broadband.
Caterbook was working fine, and most of our clients were unaffected by this issue but we were able to assist in getting most people to connect to their Caterbook via one of three workarounds, which we're detailing here and recommend you familiarise yourselves with, irrespective of which Internet Service Provider you use.
Connect to your phone's WiFi Hotspot.
If your mobile phone has a Wifi hotspot feature, try activating this and connect your PC to it instead of your regular office WiFi or network. Bear in mind that BT owns EE, so whilst possibly the easiest to implement, this might not resolve the issue for everyone.
Use a Virtual Private Network.
A Virtual Private Network (VPN) will use alternative routing to get to our data centre. You may already have something like Nord VPN, but if not the web browser Opera has a built-in, free VPN.
Download Opera from https://www.opera.com/
- Install the program, and launch it.
- Click the "VPN button at the top,
- Click the circular button above "Unprotected".
- Navigate to https://app.caterbook.net and log in from there.
Change your connection's DNS settings via Control Panel in Windows or similar.
It was BT's DNS servers that were down during this incident (and this is not the first time this has happened). By configuring your PC to use the following alternative, free, public DNS servers you can access working DNS.
Google - 8.8.8.8
Cloudflare - 1.1.1.1
From Control Panel in Windows 10, click Network and Sharing Centre, click Change adaptor settings.
Right click on your BT connection (here, this is 'Ethernet', yours might be 'WiFi') and then click Properties.
Next, click to highlight Internet Protocol Version 4, and click the Properties button.
Click to "Use the following DNS server addresses:" and then enter four "8" characters in Preferred and four "1" characters in Alternative DNS server fields, tick validate on exit and then finally, click OK.
This method gives two alternate DNS providers, if Google were ever to go down, you would have Cloudflare as a backup.