UPDATE2 Sky Broadband Suffers Outage in North West England

A large number of Sky Broadband and related Sky Talk (phone) customers in parts of North West England (mostly in and around Cheshire) appear to be suffering from a Major Service Outage (MSO), which began last night at around 8pm and is continuing this morning.

The affected areas include: WARRINGTON, WESTWOOD, PENKETH, WIDNES, FRODSHAM, HELSBY, RUNCORN MAIN, CULCHETH, IRLAM and PADGATE. An update posted at 10:24pm last night 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 and we’ll provide an update on this page once we’ve discovered what is causing the fault. We’re sorry for any inconvenience caused.”

A second update was posted at 7:03am this morning, which merely confirmed that “engineers are currently on site and repair work is continuing.” Unfortunately Sky isn’t saying what caused the fault or when it might be resolved, although most major large-scale outages are normally fixed within a day. At the time of writing we have not seen any related reports from the other major ISPs, so it’s probably an issue unique to the Sky / Easynet network.

UPDATE 10:25am

As is so often the case we’re hearing that the above problem has been traced to a broken fibre optic cable, most likely one of Sky’s core capacity links (depending upon the damage those can sometimes take a while to fix). Breakages often occur due to damage caused by third-party contractors, who might not be aware of the cable’s exact location when excavating the ground.

In such situations it’s possible that Sky can get some customers back online by rerouting traffic through slower backup links, although this often won’t work for everybody.

UPDATE 12:33pm

Sky reports that the cable break has now been resolved.