UPD SNAILS Attack Virgin Media Broadband Cabinet in Telford, Cause Fire

On the list of bizarre things that can happen to telecoms infrastructure in the UK, having snails attack your broadband cabinet is surely right at the top. But that’s more or less exactly what has happened to Virgin Media in Telford (Shropshire, England).

Let’s face it, we can’t trust snails. Not only do they slime their way around our gardens and eat all our favourite plants, as well as sometimes slithering their way into our homes in order to be greeted by delightful expressions of avid disgust and mutterings of “Iewwww.. snail.. snail!“, but now they’re after our broadband too! No I say! Bugger off snails.

In this case an unspecified number of the slimy gastropods (love that word, it sounds like somebody who visits the pub far too often, assuming such a thing were possible) decided to stage an assault against one of Virgin Media’s cable broadband cabinets on Baldwin Webb Avenue in Donnington.

At this point the snails seemingly decided to replicate ISIL’s advance across the Middle East and grew a suicidal attraction to the cabinet’s warm battery, which promptly did what any self-respecting cabinet battery would do when faced with an onslaught of the slimy variety.. it electrocuted the lot of them. Hah, take that snails!

The local Shropshire Star reports that a number of passers-by reported the ensuing blaze to the local fire service (Wellington Fire Station), which promptly responded and the blaze was finally extinguished at just after midday on Wednesday. A number of local premises were reportedly affected by the outage, although sadly Virgin Media chose not to comment (golden PR opportunity missed).

So it turns out that Snails are total dicks, which is probably why the French eat them. My kingdom for a picture of Virgin’s snail apocalypse, or Snapocalypse if you prefer. Thanks to one of our readers, Patrick, for pointing us towards the event of epic proportions.

UPDATE 1:36pm

A spokesperson for Virgin Media has been in touch with an update: “We apologise for this sticky situation and are grateful to those who have come out of their shells to alert us to this problem. We take all situations affecting our cabinets seriously and quickly resolved this so that our customers can enjoy ultrafast broadband at anything but a snail’s pace.” Now that’s more like it.