Malicious Fibre Break Disrupts Virgin Media Broadband Near Manchester
Customers of UK ISP Virgin Media’s broadband network in and around the Manchester area (Burnley) are currently suffering from internet connectivity problems after several fibre optic cables were damaged in the area. A separate cable break also appears to have occurred in the Birmingham area, which has added some further disruption.
The issue in Burnley appears to have started just after 9pm last night. A spokesperson for Virgin Media said: “We’re aware of an issue affecting services for customers in the Manchester area which has been caused by a break in a fibre cable. Our engineers have been working flat out overnight to repair the damaged fibres and will continue to do so to restore services as quickly as possible.”
The exact cause of the incident in Manchester is still being investigated, although ISPreview understands that the damage is currently believed to have been malicious. A total of 8 fibres are understood to have been cut, including an important 288/12f cable. Virgin Media’s engineers have had to install two new chambers, pull fresh fibre cables through and splice all of them back together. This is not a quick fix.
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The good news is that most of the work has now completed, although some issues remain and a rough ETA for the fix seems to be after 4pm. Separately, we’ve noted that one of Virgin Media’s dark fibre cables seems to have been broken in the Birmingham area, although this is currently playing second fiddle to the Burnley incident.
Telecoms infrastructure is protected by strict laws in the UK and the police are likely to be investigating the incident. Sadly, the people who commit such acts rarely have any regard for the serious problems they cause, which can in some cases disrupt more than just internet access (e.g. telecare, access to emergency services etc.).
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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They can use some of the money they are overcharging customers out of contract for repairs. Probably some disgruntled customer who has had enough of Virgin Media, not that i condone vandalism i should add.
288/12f is, as I understand it, 24 tubes each containing 12 fibres. So, 24×12=288 fibres. Cable like this is critical in VM’s network and hundreds (and potentially thousands) of customers are without broadband. A 288‑fibre cable is thick and it was certainly cut maliciously.
its not a big cable.. will take seconds to cut through.
Maybe 10-20mm wide.
One chop with some cable croppers. Take seconds to do
For those who have left the EU behind and would like imperial measurements, not metric, approx half inch to three quarters of an inch. 🙂
The truth is that the metric system was invented during the French Revolution and spread by Napoleon I. Nothing to do with the EU.
@Smith, For your info the EU use the metric system, and France are part of the European Union. Even when the UK was part of the EU many traders refused to use their system. Some people love to argue about anything, go and live in it Napoleon Smith, for me, i’m proud to be British, and love feet and inches.
‘Some people love to argue about anything…’
Sure do. Imagine someone popping up on a thread like this regarding civil engineering, chambers, ducts, etc, to make a political point by equating SI units used by over 9/10ths of the world’s population, virtually every nation and widely used here as part of ongoing metrification with the EU?
This while the poor folks who did the repairs had to get at the 49/54 mm or 90/96.5 mm ducts in chambers going down to 390-750 mm under the surface. If they were all the way down at 750 mm should be the FW10 chamber, so potentially lots of cable in there given they’re 2320 x 740 x 750 mm.
Sad state of affairs indeed. Makes me want to go to the pub and have a pint. Might treat myself to a 50 ml double as a chaser. It’s only half a mile away so I’m all set. Will pick up a couple of 2 litre bottles of milk given they’re on multibuy from the garage on the way back. Should see how much they’re charging for a litre of fuel right now!
@ The_Truth — You’re one of those marvellous souls who measures everything in buses, train carriages, whales, and football pitches, too, aren’t you?
It’s absurd that the Imperial system still has its hangers on. In 2025.
Goodness forbid we standardise with the rest of the world.
Burnley is nowhere near Manchester.
29 miles isn’t ‘nowhere near’.
@Carlos walk it and then tell us.
Who walks anywhere these days?
It’s not far but not everyone knows the location of the town so “near Manchester” is the usual response. It gives context.
We are a business in the city centre of Manchester and we still have no internet at 5.25pm. This has affected business terrible because our phone lines run through the same same system.
If you’re on VM Business the. You should have an SLA depending on your package and a 4G backup
Can this be corrected as it was actually in Swinton approx 7miles from Manchester city centre not Burnley which is 50miles in the wrong direction!
Also it was 3×288 1×144 and 1×1152 so very much not a small job, which also took out O2 for quite a bit of Manchester including where the actual damage was.
Burnley is 22 miles from Manchester
Nothing working yet it’s 12.40 am Saturday morning. No Internet TV or landline since 8pm Thursday. What a joke they said it would be fixed by 4pm Friday.
The only joke was the repair time estimate. If anyone promised it’d be fixed by then they shouldn’t have. If you saw an estimated fix time and took that as a promise that’s on you.
If your issue is that they didn’t fix it within 20 hours you’re welcome to make a massive amount of money by coming up with a way they could’ve fixed it all flawlessly and faster. Blame the people who cut the cables, not the people who’ve been working in shifts since Thursday night fixing it. Can’t just throw more people at this or spend more money to get it done faster, it takes as long as it takes.
Looks like your mobile still works so not totally cut off. Could be worse.
You sound like those pp that whinge you have no power after a massive storm. The damage caused will take a massive amount of time, new cabling and man/woman power. Don’t get mad a VM, be angry of the idiots that caused the damage.
This is what’s called a trunk fibre and the fix will take time.
We had the same issue in the northeast and each time VM fixed it the same bloke would go out and set fire to the chamber, disrupting customer for weeks. The police caught him in the end. Be patient fella.
Still now working in M8, they have given a time of 8pm for ETA.
Which is 1hr before their compensation scheme would start.
An o2 mass is also down which is also part of the virgin media family. Resulting in no internet, tv, phone or data on mobile phones for some. Considering how much is dependent on this now even though the job is large there needs to be some compensation for everyone impacted. Remote workers, alarms, health care, heating, elderly with nothing to do or talk to, the list is endless.
I think it about time for every Virgin Media / Openreach full fibre poles to have CCTV on it to watch and future vandal attack who cut off fibre optic cable.
I suspect in such a case, it would probably somebody wearing black at night with a scarf over their face. Good luck catching somebody based on CCTV if that were the case. It might catch the odd idiot who doesn’t realise but nobody else.
The damage was underground. To have CCTV on every pole means power and network to every pole: not viable. Also pretty surveillance state: too much.
and a death ray. Operated by AI naturally.
4.0pm Saturday prestwich virgin media still not working that’s nearly 40 hours down what a disgrace
U
You’re welcome to fix it for them if it’s so easy, Chris.
If you can dig the two new chambers, remove the multiple damaged cables, replace them and resplice over 2000 fibres, twice as it’s once at each end of the new cables, flawlessly with no errors due to incorrect records or splicer errors, faster than they are all power to you. Whatever you do for a living give it up and make a ton of money out of this instead.
Again, armchair engineers like can do it faster. The damage is to trunk fibres which is a massive job, the report mentioned installing a new chamber, this tells me who ever did this have poured petrol in the chamber and lit it on fire.
If so, this job will take at least 2days. It’s like ppl complaining they have no power after a massive storm. Be patient.
As a general rule if someone else’s problem seems trivial to solve you are either; a) a genius or b) experiencing the duning-kruger effect in relation to an issue you are so ignorant of you don’t even know how ignorant you are.
Geniuses are rare.
Probably Russia interfering with our infrastructure again. All this would have been paranoid delusions ten years ago, but now it really is a possibility, with undersea cables cut and constant state sponsored DoS attacks, hacks, internet disruption of important government bodies and hospitals and digital theft of R&D materials, and banks.
If that wasn’t enough, Trump trying to sell Ukraine to Putin and threatening to grab Greenland from Denmark.
This is far worse than the cold war. the Russians and Chinese have been busy little bees while the west has been incredibly stupid. Chinese chips with built-in spying hardware and software.
When you see all this, it’s really not a stretch to see interference with internet infrastructure cabling being part of it
Russia bringing down the West by stopping some people near Manchester from watching Netflix?
I’m not sure you’ve thought this through.
6pm, North Manchester, still no internet. Current estimate is 8pm Sat 13th Dec.
Estimates have gone from 4pm Friday to 10pm Friday to 8pm Saturday.
I don’t mind how long it takes, but I’d ask Virgin not to give unrealistic estimates.
Yup. I get you.
Better for them to not have the automated repair time for things like this and be very pessimistic with the repair estimate. An issue like this the people reconnected early on in the fix could be a day or more ahead of the later ones that assuming it goes perfectly however giving every residential user impacted the later estimate and an earlier repair better than the default.
Not impossible some records are wrong or the wrong fibres have been spliced and some are offline a lot longer than most and nothing they can do there but outperforming realistic and pessimistic estimates is way better than constantly setting the clock back four hours.
M8 still down just received a text message to say the fix time has changed to 13th dec at 10pm now.
It’s 8:30pm Saturday still no internet in M8 Manchester. It’s a disgrace! Virgin compensation is a joke too. Should be allowed to break my contract and leave virgin at this rate.
Read your contract.
They haven’t broken any terms you agreed to when signing up, including compensation.
Be unhappy with yourself agreeing to terms your clearly don’t agree with.
You are entitled to automatic compensation for total loss of broadband or phone after two working days. You can always cancel by giving 30 days’ notice.
For those needing backup my standard recommendation is a MiFi router and a data-only 4G SIM card (lots of monthly contracts available).
What SLA are you paying for? What does your contract say?
A muscular regulator would be encouraging the various big networking companies to be working together to provide resilience for such occasions by providing alternative routes that can be enabled in minutes in response to a formal notification of a major incident.
The usual resillience heuristic is that the worthwhile options cost 2.5x the non-resillient one. How much are you prepared to pay for broadband?
Your ‘muscular regulator’ just makes broadband unaffordable to large numbers of people.
I think your multiplier assumes resilience at all levels (and yes that level of resiliency is expensive). And also assumes that the full cost is internalized to each operator as opposed to mutually shared with some key interconnections (“I’ll let you use mine if you will let me use yours”).
I think protecting some critical central/regional components where loss would create wide scale outages can be achieved cost effectively, vs resilience at a local level (although I do wonder if a low cost resilient design to support traffic rerouting could be engineered at street cabinet level).
Noted that we have decades of experience of engineering regional resilience in electric power (Heathrow outage being a “last mile” problem to one local area), and the cost is not excessive.
Central and regional components are already resilient, Miles. This was a local outage equivalent to all the fibre cables in a chamber near an Openreach handover exchange being lost. All the FTTP PONs, all the leased lines in there would be lost. The cuts were between premises and their serving hub site. Once at the hub there are two fibre routes on to the rest of the network.
There is no low cost resilient design that can support passive optical networks without making them no longer passive. There would have to be secondary fibre paths that would have to be spliced manually and cut over within the exchange or equivalent. The alternative is having many active cabinets all over the place terminating the PONs, so OLTs everywhere, with redundant links back to the handover point which in itself carries risks in terms of damage to the cabinet, having to maintain power to it, etc.
A reminder that Openreach FTTC cabinets did not have redundant fibre back to their handover exchange in place, Virgin Media optical nodes do not have redundant links back to their hub sites in place and it’s not normally a major problem.
TL;DR this was a ‘last mile’ problem that would’ve needed reengineering of the last mile. At some point the last mile involves many links aggregated together and that’s where the damage happened.