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There have been a few times that Sky Broadband in the UK has gone down cutting off the internet to 1000’s of people. This is happening right now as I type this post!
We just wanted to get a quick message out there that this is due to Sky’s DNS servers, not so much “the internet is down”, but more like the postman has gone on strike.
If you know what you are doing, change your DNS servers to Cloudflare or Google on 8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1 and it should do the trick. If you need a little help, just Google “change DNS server on <device name>” and there will no doubt be endless articles with instructions on how to do this for your own device.
Change the Sky Router DNS Servers
Sky does not give you the option of changing the DNS servers on their routers, so you will have to do this on each device you want back on the internet.
However, there is a bit of a bodge that you can do to change the DNS servers on a Sky router.
Please note this disclaimer – you do this at your own risk and PLEASE ensure that you backup your existing configuration first!!
Log in to your router by typing 192.168.0.1 into the address bar of your internet browser and press enter. This will take you to your Sky routers admin page. If it asks you for a username and password, it’s usually these unless you have changed it yourself:
- Username: admin
- Password: sky
Go to ‘Maintenance‘ > ‘Backup Settings‘
Under ‘Save a Copy of Current Settings‘ click ‘Backup‘ and save the file to somewhere you’ll be able to find it. Make a copy of this file and keep it safe as this will be your actual backup. You can then edit the original file.
Using Notepad++ (or built-in Windows Notepad if you wish) look for this line:
<DNSServers>90.207.238.97,90.207.238.99</DNSServers>These are the Sky default DNS servers, the ones that are not working, so these are what you will want to change. Change this entry to the DNS servers that you want to use, Google primary and secondary DNS for example would be:
<DNSServers>8.8.8.8,8.8.4.4</DNSServers>So the primary DNS is first, then a comma followed by the secondary DNS server – no spaces. If you want to use any other public DNS servers, you can, just do a quick Google search and make the change in the same place.
Once you are happy with the changes you have made, go ahead and save the file.
Go back to the Sky router page in your internet browser and go back to ‘Maintenance‘ > ‘Backup Settings‘
Then look for ‘Restore Saved Settings from a File’ – click ‘Choose file’ and select the configuration file that you just edited and saved.
Click on the ‘Restore’ button.
The router will now reboot and the router will then use the Google DNS instead of the faulty Sky DNS servers.
Restore the Backup
If you have problems, or you just want to set your DNS servers back to Sky once they are fixed, you can follow the same process starting at the ‘Restore saved settings from a file’ part but use the original, unedited backup file of your configuration.
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