UPDATE Sky Broadband Outage in Gloucestershire and Wiltshire

Customers of Sky Broadband in the Gloucestershire and Wiltshire areas of England yesterday began suffering from a Major Service Outage (MSO) after an unspecified problem triggered a loss of broadband and phone service across multiple telephone exchanges in the area.

The issue, which began at around 6:30pm yesterday afternoon, appears to be isolated to Sky’s own network and we haven’t yet noted any complaints from other ISPs. Often the most common cause of such faults is a broken fibre optic capacity supply cable, which can sometimes be accidentally cut by negligent street works (third party contractors), but this has not been confirmed.

At present the affected areas include TOOTHILL, WOOTTON BASSETT, SWINDON, MALMESBURY, CHIPPENHAM, CORSHAM, CIRENCESTER, SOUTH CERNEY, FARINGDON, STRATTON and ST MARGARET.

Sky Service Status Update (18:45pm 3rd September 2015)

You might not be able to get online or make/receive phone calls due to a problem in your local area. We’re working on fixing the problem and we’ll provide an update on this page once we’ve discovered what is causing the fault. We’re sorry for any inconvenience caused.

The last update was posted at 10:29pm last night, which confirmed that Sky’s engineers had “arrived on site and they’ve started repair work“. A further progress update has been promised for this morning and Sky has again apologised for the problems. Meanwhile customers have flooded Sky’s Facebook and Twitter support channels with complaints.

Selection of Related Customer Gripes (Facebook):

D.Gray: “Disgusted with sky broadband and phone being down in west Swindon the whole of yesterday evening.”

M.Nolan: “This is a joke how can I run a business and I’m sending my kids to school tomorrow on the first week back with no homework as we have no internet what I want to know is how am I going to be compensated.”

S.Morris: “That “live outage” map is as alive as my nan, she died 10yrs ago. Swindon down and not the football club.”

S.Smith: “We went down at 6.45[pm] in the middle of a phone conversation!…already waited on automated call for 10 mins prior!!!“

UPDATE:

A new post just popped up on Sky’s Twitter stream a few minutes ago.