Runnymede Council Says BT Cut Off their Phone and Internet Connections UPDATE
The Runnymede Borough Council (RBC) in Surrey (England) appears to be claiming that “BT have cut off the phone and internet connections“, which a council account on Facebook said had left “as many as 2000 vulnerable residents without their Community Alarm service which summons help in an emergency“. But the reality may be more complex.
The incident, which was first spotted by Thinkbroadband this afternoon, was perhaps initially being a bit miscategorised by the council account, not least because it’s far more likely to be a general network fault than an intentional disconnection (BT would be incredibly unlikely to behave that way toward a local authority).
Speaking of which, the council’s Facebook page and website have since been updated to use a more generic message: “We are currently experiencing some technical disruption to our telephone and online services. Please try again later today. We apologise for any inconvenience.”
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ISPreview has contacted BT in the hope of clarifying the situation and when it will be resolved.
UPDATE 3rd July 2026 @ 7am
The RBC posted a statement at 6pm to say all was well again: “We’re pleased to report our phones and online systems are back up and running.“
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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If this is even slightly legit, we can expect the actual situation and events to be investigated by OFCOM in the coming months.
I wonder how much resilience was built in to the setup. In this day and age could they have had a backup connection using say mobile and or Starlink
Unfortunately with the vast majority of organisations (local government especially) good enough = cheap enough.
Community Alarm control room is using a number allocated to Virgin.
BT possibly trying to port a Virgin range holder number from PSTN to DV, perhaps?
Yeah good luck with that…
I know of at least one company which uses a combination of VMO2 for telephone (VOIP), ISP, etc. despite AFAIK still using OR for the physical connection.
Don’t know the exact setup, just vague details.