Openreach Exchange Fire Disrupts Broadband Services in Strathaven
Broadband internet connectivity, phone and some Ethernet services being delivered by the Strathaven Telephone Exchange in South Lanarkshire (Scotland) have been disrupted after the site was hit by a serious fire. Approximately 1,500 customers on Openreach’s (BT) local network are understood to have been impacted.
The fire is said to have occurred during Saturday morning (24th Jan 2026) and an industry briefing, seen by ISPreview, indicates that “significant damage” has sadly been done to the building. But thankfully nobody was hurt and firefighters have since put the fire out.
Details of the incident are currently still in short supply because Openreach has had to wait for the building to be made safe and investigated by the emergency services before they can fully assess things. But the cause is NOT currently believed to be related to faulty equipment and early indications suggest some sort of 3rd party involvement.
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An Openreach spokesperson told ISPreview:
“We’re aware of a fire at our site in the early hours of Saturday morning and our teams continue to assess the damage and making the area safe. We’re doing everything we can to minimise the impact on people who use our phone and broadband services. Engineers are only able to begin work as soon as it’s safe, and we’ll provide further updates as soon as we’re able.”
The site is currently closed and, due to the ongoing investigation and the extent of the damage, Openreach are not yet able to confirm a full restoration timescale. More updates are expected to follow during the early week as the operator’s restoration teams get to work.
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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Shouldn’t all the asbestos protect it? 🙂
Curious to see how Openreach respond if it turns out to be extensively damaged. The OR spreadsheet says – unsurprisingly – it is listed for closure and the OR GEA headend is already elsewhere. Copper services will be another matter of course, but is it worth bothering with instead of moving customers to newer products.
I suspect an emergency mobile in a container will be plonked in the car park and left there until the exchange closes.
It would be interesting if the exchange has few — if any — ADSL customers on them. They could speed up closure of this exchange by simply focusing their efforts to roll out FTTP to those customers and then decommission it if they wanted to. Funnily enough, the Road Works Commissioner shows that Openreach are already working in this exchange area [the town itself specifically] on FTTP related works [covers, cabling, overblow etc]
125us – I guess that’s my question. What would they have inside a mobile unit now, and (even if the ancient kit still works) do they still have the skills to bring up a replacement PSTN switch?
Why would they bother when the lines would have been migrated off of it this year anyway. Would make more sense to move customers over to BT PDPL or Openreach’s new EVAC.
Do these mobile exchanges have space for LLU operators to install their kit or would they be expected to do their own thing?
SEG – remember that FTTC is also suitable.
That’s not in Openreach’s hands. The end customers are customers of their ISPs and it’s for them to have that discussion with customers.
> do they still have the skills to bring up a replacement PSTN switch?
This is a very interesting question!
I guess they could migrate anyone onto SoTAP which, I presume, is using modern equipment?
yes. they install a media gateway in the exchange (or what’s left of it) and move lines over to it. From the customer perspective it should behave the same as an analogue PSTN line, although it doesn’t have all of the same features and modem performance isn’t guaranteed as it is VoIP based
It’s not that dissimilar to how BT intended to replace the PSTN about 20 years ago. This is also how the LLU operators handled their own landlines for about as long.
I am very concerned about the wellbeing of my 90 year old mother. She lives on her own. Due to this outage my mother has no access to a land line or broadband. I contacted Sky for update and they said open reach were working on the outage and that it could be another 2 days until the problem is fixed. I said that I was very concerned about my 90 year old mother.Sky advised that as she has a mobile they could not escalate the issue.
I said to SKY that although my mother has a mobile phone she does not know how use the phone part of the mobile.
Thus she is unable to dial 999 or 111.
My mother has the local authority alarm system with the button . My mother and I do no know if this alarm system is still operating or if the system is down due to the outage.
Maybe buy her a mobile phone that looks and works like a desk phone, or a landline phone adapter. This is less than ideal, but she could make calls using this temporary solution.
I hope she is OK.
What National infrastructure not protected by maintained fire suppressions systems, way to go UK.
Someone dies because thay can’t call teh emergency services, isnt that corporate manslaughter I wonder, and I wonder what government minister is responsible… Amazing we have governance without accountability but that’s they way those that govern like it..