Openreach Restores Broken Fibre After Major Kent UK Outage

Openreach (BT) have restored their broadband and phone services in the Swanscombe and surrounding areas of Kent (England), which follows a major network outage that struck thousands of local premises. This began after damage was caused to the operator’s core fibre optic cables at around midday on Saturday (31st Aug).

The incident caused disruption for customers of both retail broadband ISPs on Openreach’s network and some other network operators that harness the same physical infrastructure (e.g. Netomnia also reported disruption). Some data capacity (backhaul) links to local mobile masts were similarly said to have been impacted, which saw slower than normal 4G and 5G mobile performance from at least O2 and EE.

The exact cause of the damage itself remains unclear, although Kent Online indicated that it was “accidental” and related to ongoing network restoring work that was taking place in the same area following last year’s landslide. The damage is understood to have been quite complex and meant that several fibres needed to be re-spliced.

Sadly, major cable breaks can often take a few short days and, in more extreme cases, a few weeks to fully resolve. But the latest update from Openreach indicates progress.

A Spokesperson for Openreach told ISPreview (today):

“We have several engineering teams currently onsite who are working hard to get customers back online after a number of our fibre cables were damaged impacting homes and businesses in the village of Swanscombe and surrounding area.

This is a complex repair job with work already ongoing in the area to restore extensive damage to our network following a cliff collapse under a key road in the village last year, so its going to take us a few days to get it sorted out.

We understand how frustrating this must be for anyone is affected and we thank anyone involved for their patience while we get things fixed. Anyone experiencing any disruption with their phone or broadband service should do their best to report it to their service provider who will then inform us.”

Openreach’s cabling team managed to pull the majority of the cable through on Saturday night. Since then, they’ve had a team of jointers on site working to connect all the cables back up, which is time-consuming due to the size of the cables and amount of work needed. But progress is being made and the team were working throughout Sunday to try and complete the works.

Some customer feedback we’ve seen suggested that the first services finally came back online at around 3-4pm yesterday afternoon, and further restorations have followed.

UPDATE:

A second update came in just as we published this story. A spokesperson for Openreach said: “All works were completed late last night – at around 21:30 – and all customers should now be back in service.”