UPDATE3 Big Broadband Outage Hits ISPs and Customers in South East England

Customers of several broadband ISPs (particularly those on Sky Broadband, BT and TalkTalk) in the South East of England appear to be suffering from a total loss of internet connectivity or unstable services, which is the result of 7 “separate” breaks in major core fibre optic cables.

The worst affected area appears to be Sussex, although this will also be having a knock-on impact for certain other parts of the south east corner. Apparently the problem began early yesterday afternoon after a cable break was located in East Sussex, although since then a further six have been identified.

The exact circumstances are not known, although such damage is often caused accidentally by third-party contractors (e.g. diggers slicing through multiple cable ducts) or criminal activity. However TalkTalk appears to pin the blame on a fence post (yep.. we always knew you couldn’t trust fence posts, no matter how inanimate they might seem!).

TalkTalk Update 6 July 08:50am:

Openreach engineers identifed cables that had been damaged by a fence post yesterday. Three cables have been replaced earlier this morning and work continues to connect them. We will continue to keep in contact with Openreach for further updates on their progress.

Sky Update 6 July 09:50am:

Repair work on the damaged fibre cables continues this morning. Further updates will be available soon. We apologise for the inconvenience.

Major breaks can take anything from a few hours to several days to repair, depending upon the severity of the damage and location.

UPDATE 12:37am

Sky has posted the following update, which confirms that the damage was caused by the installation of new fence posts. “Engineers continue working to reconnect services. Third party installation of fence posts had caused multiple fibre cable breaks. Further updates will be available soon,” said Sky. The centre of the problem is believed to be in Peacehaven. Incidentally Virgin Media is currently deploying their cable network in the same area.

UPDATE 1:59pm

The expectation is that the cables should be fixed by this evening, although sometimes the normal flow of internet traffic can take a little longer to level out and you might need to reboot your router. At present the problem is still on-going.

UPDATE 7th July 2017

It looks like the problem was eventually resolved at around 9pm last night, with Sky suggesting that around 32,000 of their customers were hit. We don’t have any figures for BT or TalkTalk etc.