Major Broadband and Phone Outage Strikes ISPs in East Scotland UPDATE

Customers of UK ISPs such as Sky Broadband and TalkTalk are this morning being affected by a loss of broadband and phone services across several exchanges in East Scotland, with some pointing the finger of blame at a damaged core network cable from Virgin Media.

A support agent for TalkTalk said, “Some customers are having issues with their phone and broadband services in Scotland. We’re working hard to get services back up and running as soon as possible. We’re sorry for any inconvenience.” Meanwhile Sky said, “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. We’re sorry for any inconvenience caused.”

The issue is of course likely to be affecting more providers and areas than just those mentioned above and the number of exchanges affected may vary, depending upon how the ISPs manage their traffic and capacity in any given area.

Assuming a cable break is responsible then most such damage occurs accidentally, often due to third party contractors, although others can be caused by malicious or criminal damage and related incidents may take several hours to resolve.

In extreme cases a serious cable break could affect an area for several days or longer but such situations are rare and usually much more isolated. Separately there are also some more sporadic outages in Newcastle.

UPDATE 1:21pm

The problems in Scotland are no longer being mentioned on TalkTalk’s service status page, which suggests that they’ve been resolved. Sky’s page is currently unchanged but may shortly follow suit.