Homes and businesses in the Welwyn Garden City (Hertfordshire) and surrounding areas (related dialling code - 01707) are being affected by a serious outage of broadband ADSL services today.

The problem, which is believed to have started at around 9pm on Thursday (9th February), was apparently caused by malicious damage to five of BT's cables. Customers of several ISPs (e.g. AAISP , Eclipse Internet , BT etc.) are understood to have been affected by the situation.

Unfortunately the damage is so serious that some residents could be left without internet, and potentially also telephone, access until sometime on Saturday. The next official update from BT isn't expected until later today or tonight.

Major outages like this are most often caused by building mistakes (e.g. diggers cutting through vital telecoms lines), vandals or thieves whom pull the copper cables out of the ground before selling them on via scrap yards.

UPDATE 13th February 2012

BT finally managed to resolve the problem late on Saturday (11th Feb 2012) afternoon (around 4pm).

UPDATE 13th February 2012 - 12:34pm

The Watford Observer has confirmed that the cable damage was caused by an attempted cable theft.