Broadband Disrupted for Shetland and Orkney by Subsea Fibre Break UPDATE
Thousands of homes and businesses across Shetland, which is a remote UK subarctic archipelago that resides north of the Scottish mainland, have suffered disruption to their broadband services this weekend after part of the main SHEFA-2 (Faroese Telecom) submarine (subsea) fibre optic cable was damaged. Premises on the Orkney Islands were also hit.
Faroese Telecom’s SHEFA-2 cable reaches Shetland via two landing sites, including one stretch that goes North West up to the Faroe Islands and another cable that runs south to connect Orkney and the Scottish Mainland. In addition, BT recently deployed an additional subsea fibre link between Shetland and Orkney as part of the ongoing R100 project.
The latest situation started at around 3am yesterday (Saturday 26th July 2025) after damage occurred on the section of SHEFA-2 that runs between Orkney and Banff in Aberdeenshire. Shetland Telecom promptly stated that their own internet customers were “unaffected as traffic switched to our resilient route via Faroe“. But the situation for Openreach (BT)’s local fibre broadband network was more problematic.
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A Spokesperson for Openreach said:
“We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience, the damage to a subsea cable from Orkney to Banff, has caused from Saturday morning. Customers can still make landline calls, and whilst we’re constantly assessing customer impact, we believe up to 10,000 customers in Faroe, Shetland and Orkney islands could have disruption to their broadband services.
We’re working on repairs as soon as we can and will update further once we can confirm our specific work and timeline. Anyone experiencing any issues should report it to their service provider for further investigation as usual.”
The cause of the break has not yet been ascertained, although the most likely reason tends to be ships dragging their anchors across the cable or fishing trawlers dragging large nets in the same way (fishing fleets usually know where the cables run, but not every trawler pays proper attention and accidents can happen). Some past cable breaks have often been attributed to these, although in the current climate nobody can rule out the potential for sabotage (here).
The latest such incident occurred in October 2022 and was much more disruptive because it involved two separate cable breaks that hit within a relatively short space of time (here). Such breaks can sometimes take several weeks to fully repair, which is partly due to the delay in arranging for a cable repair ship to be dispatched, as well as uncertainty around the scale of damage and weather. Repair ships have recently been in quite high demand.
According to Faroese Telecom, the location of the damage was some 9km off the coast of Orkney, and they currently expect a repair vessel to be on site by the middle of next week. The outage does not appear to be impacting fixed line phone (voice) services. We should add that residents on Shetland can now also purchase packages via Starlink’s LEO satellite broadband network, which may be a useful alternative for redundancy.
The outage comes shortly after Vodafone (VodafoneThree) announced that they had begun a new “feasibility study”, which will explore the possibility and cost of deploying a new subsea fibre optic cable system to help transform broadband and mobile connectivity on the Shetland Islands and boost resilience (here).
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UPDATE 6:09pm
Openreach now believes that the disruption has only impacted hundreds of customers and not the “up to 10,000” initially estimated in their first response.
An Openreach spokesperson said:
“We’ll continue to assess, but customer broadband impact is more limited than initially thought, with hundreds of customers disrupted. Landline calls were never impacted, and we’ll continue to work hard to resolve and repair.”
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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Does this mean that Openreach use the SHEFA-2 cable for their network too? I would have thought they would utilise some of the R100 cables they have off both Islands to route traffic?
Yes, Openreach have a fibre on SHEFA-2 for their optical backhaul sevice. There is a new R100 cable to Orkney but that is not live yet, apart from the section to Fair Isle. ISPs can rent capacity on the Openreach backhaul over SHEFA-2, and for resilience they can also choose to have a backup via Faroese telecom, which routes via Faroe. BT/EE/Plusnet have both routes off Shetland, I assume not all ISPs do, it seems some only have the one Openreach run service back to mainland Scotland, so are more susceptible to a single cable loss.
I wonder if they’re not fully integrated into the network yet with them being so new?
Still completely unfixed in Kirkwall, Orkney for Vodafone customers. In case you want to update. Vodafone letting customers down as usual.
If Vodafone fixed broadband is running there via the Openreach network, why is it Vodafone’s fault (or even Openreach’s for that matter)? If it’s the mobile network that’s the issue, is it related? If it’s back-haul to the masts, it’s still not really a Vodafone issue? Cable repair ships are getting older and are very very busy. Getting one there this week or next is a decent effort, and hopefully it will be repaired soon. Besides, you clearly have some form of service or backup, so what’s the issue for you? Or was it just a chance to take an un-earned swipe at Vodafone?
If any ISP choses to buy only a single link to the islands on one cable run by Openreach, when other ISPs chose to buy more than one route (and spent more money to do so), then I think you can blame the ISP that chose only one route and not the provider of that route. Subsea cables break.
What Mick says.
Other ISPs have managed to restore broadband access, according to local sources. The phone lines at the hospital (which Openreach claim were unaffected, different story though) are back up too. When you go to Openreach to ask about returning service to your home they explicitly tell you to speak to the ISP, in this case Vodafone. So yes, the evidence presented shows the frustration should be with the ISP, not Openreach.
The ‘service’ I have is my mobile. It’s much slower than normal, unsurprisingly as more folk are using 4g at the moment. It’s unfit for working on, and unfortunately my work phone runs off the same underlying network. My swipe at Vodafone is circumstantial and entirely merited in this instance. The fact that I have had loads of supply issues with them locally entirely by the by (but explains the ‘as usual’ part of my initial comment).
These forums are nothing but a whine fest for some, ppl give great technical information and you still have the (but squirrel) brigade find some fault and complaining about stuff they have no knowledge of.
How can someone of you live life just hate Telco operators? Chill guys…lol
My elderly mum joined vodaphone for Internet and landlines phone a month ago and she can’t use the landlines so that’s a lot of damn use.
I use sky and it was working on Sunday morning and BT and talk talk are working but I read somewhere vodaphome won’t pay for an extra cable this why its still out of action.
It’s terrible isn’t it?
Still not fixed when everyone else’s looks like it is. And no word on when it will be back online either. Looks like Vodafone have just decided to wait it out until the shefa-2 cable is fixed, rather than making alternative arrangements. Awful.
Just an update. Still no broadband for Vodafone customers. Allegedly the boat is/has been working on the cable, but no return of service yet, and with bad weather I am assuming it will be a while yet.