Broadband Disrupted Near Durham UK After Vandals Cut Fibre Optic Cables
A number of homes, businesses and several network operators, including Netomnia (Youfibre, Brsk) and Openreach (BT), were impacted yesterday outside the City of Durham after vandals gained access to a chamber and cut vital fibre optic cables; disrupting local broadband connectivity for a protracted period.
The incident appears to have occurred sometime during the small hours of Wednesday (1st Oct) morning, around the junction of Littletown Lane and Coalford Lane in County Durham. Netomnia later issued an update (here) to confirm that their engineers would be working on the issue through the night, which had been identified as “an act of vandalism on the network, and our fibre cables have been cut … We’re working closely with the security team at [Openreach] to determine how this occurred“.
The good news this morning, which was confirmed just a few short minutes before we posted this article, is that “the unplanned outage in these locations is now resolved“. Netomnia are now advising customers who may still be experiencing issues to “please power off and back on your ONT (the small box on your wall) and your router“.
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Regular ISPreview readers will already be aware that, over the past few years, there has been somewhat of an increase in physical attacks against UK broadband and mobile networks (examples here, here, here and here), as well as the engineers responsible for building and maintaining them. Such attacks don’t just cause costly physical damage but can also leave local homes and businesses disconnected, often for a protracted period, from vital communication services.
Quite why people do this isn’t always clear. Most such criminal incidents are often considered to be vandalism, although in some cases this can relate to the theft of valuable network equipment (e.g. batteries or old copper telecoms cables), attempts to disrupt security systems at a specific site (usually pointless due to 4G/5G backups), revenge by disgruntled former employees / rivals or may even form part of a poorly conceived protest.
Such networks are typically considered to be part of Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) and damaging them is thus a serious criminal offence, which has in the past caused some people to face prison sentences. But the existing rules and punishments don’t always seem to be acting as enough of a deterrent, and the industry has previously called for changes (here).
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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Why would anyone cut up fibre optic? Madness! Hope they get caught and do some unpaid work for a very long time!
To get to the copper cable behind it
Operators need to work together in these situations
This is crazy. complete wanton stupidity at the highest order.
needs to be severe punishment for this. Some people rely heavily on their broadband.
Although I commend Netomina for acting very swiftly.
@Mark, is the resolution for both Netomina and Openreach or is the openreach side still affected?
If your intent was to launch an attack on engineers, choosing such a location offers a high success rate and a ready number of routes to evade capture afterwards.
The location is unlikely strategic, but such events are also treated too lightly in view of growing tensions towards the East. For all we know this might just have been a rehearsal.
Not even trying to steal the cable they were just there to cause damage it seems? I would say a protest against poles but wouldn’t make sense to do it in that location.
This outage could have caused impact to various local businesses, people working from home etc. The person or people responsible need to do community service and pay for the damage caused
Well, presumably once they cut the cable, they realised it was fibre and not copper, so they scarpered as it was worthless.
If the photo above is from this actual incident the we can clearly see a cut copper cable in the background, the most likely target
The picture was taken by Netomnia at the site.
I’ve said it before, but attacks on networks should be considered terrorism / disruption to critical infrastructure. No more £50 fines. Jail.
Working for an alt-net, we see this regularly, though the vandals turn out to be contractors working for other operators using our cables as draw wires.
Netomnia cables are so badly installed tieing in everything else that even the thieves find they are getting in the way.
Unlikely to get a jail sentence for this, especially a first offence, as the prisons are full as it is. Looks like vandalism in this instance, as the cut copper cable is still in place.