Fibrus CEO Apologises for Lengthy Broadband Outages in Northern Ireland

The CEO and Co-Founder of UK ISP Fibrus, Dominic Kearns, has apologised to the several thousand premises in Northern Ireland that are still without access to their full fibre broadband network following Storm Éowyn (pronounced ‘Ay-oh-win’), which struck nearly three weeks ago. But most of their customers are now back online.

The storm, which was the result of explosive cyclogenesis (aka – a weather bomb), struck parts of the United Kingdom on Friday 24th January 2025 (here and here) and focused most of its destructive energy (wind speeds of up to 114mph) on Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland. Since then, network operators across the country, particularly Openreach and Fibrus, have scrambled to repair significant levels of network damage (here).

At its peak Fibrus was having to deal with the loss of service to 40,000 premises (customers), which by around 5-6th February had been reduced to 6,000 premises and the latest figure given yesterday is that around 2,800 customers are still offline. We should point out that sometimes the ultimate cause for such issues has been a lack of mains power, which often gets conflated with broadband, but is ultimately an issue for the power companies.

Most of those still offline are understood to be in the Fermanagh, South Tyrone and Mid Ulster areas. Fibrus is already offering compensation to those customers who have been offline for more than 48 working hours, which amounts to £5 per day – until the service is back online.

Dominic Kearns, CEO of Fibrus, said:

“Since recording this message our teams have made further progress and our storm faults now sit at less than 1% of our network at around 2,800 customers out of service. We are making great progress but I wanted to take the opportunity to apologise to those that remain offline. This storm has left its mark on rural NI.

Unlike the electricity network ours is more complex and we have dependencies on others such as Openreach to enable us to make the necessary fixes. Our engineering resourcing on the ground are 700% of what they normally are and our call centre has 80% more capacity than usual. I want to assure you that we are working tirelessly to get our communities and customers back connected again.”

Readers can find a video of Dominic’s apology on LinkedIn (we wish they’d put it on YouTube too so it can be embedded) and it’s worth noting that at least one other alternative network, Welsh ISP Ogi, has sent some of their engineers into Northern Ireland (here) to help support Fibrus’s teams in the field.

We should point out that it’s sadly not uncommon, after a major storm, for some remote rural areas to experience protracted network outages lasting several weeks or longer (Openreach sees a few of these each year). Such major events, which can impact a wide area, represent an extreme challenge for network operators to tackle and this can put a strain on their resources.

This is before we even consider that the network operators have to work with other suppliers (e.g. energy providers), which will be facing challenges of their own. Not to mention the usual delays from the need to secure road permits/permissions from local authorities for certain jobs, as well as constraints in the availability of materials and the requirement to make a site safe before engineers can start work.