There are major issues with telephone and broadband services in the UK, and
Usenet posts are not getting through to some news servers. There has been a
major fire in Paddington, London, affecting over 400 telephone exchanges
around the country, causing problems to telephone, mobile and broadband
services over the whole country. The worst affected ISP's are TalkTalk,
Tiscali, and Vodafone mobiles.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03...e_house_burns/

http://www.gradwellstatus.com/

This second link gives a further link to
http://www.gradwell.com/userfiles/BT..._Exchanges.xls , giving a list of
all the affected exchanges in the country.

This is NOT an April joke! Thought you'd all like to know what was slowing
things up.

At the moment, posts aren't getting thought to eternal-september, but are
reaching freenews.netfront. Well at least they were a couple of hours ago.
Hope this gets there.

jim, Northampton