Posted: 24th Mar, 2010 By: MarkJ

Cable giant Virgin Media UK suffered a serious broadband, TV and phone service outage yesterday in Leeds (West Yorkshire) after dumb thieves ripped a large section of the operators fibre optic cable out of the ground assuming it was made of valuable copper.
A Virgin Media spokesman told The Register :
"Malicious damage was caused to our network in the LS11 area of Leeds resulting in loss of service for some of our customers. Our network engineers were dispatched immediately and restoration is currently underway and is being dealt with as a high priority.
We take incidents like this extremely seriously. The police have attended the scene, our internal security teams have been notified and a full investigation is currently underway."
Sadly criminal acts like this are not uncommon and BT in particular has been the victim of many such incidents in the recent past. Perhaps one advantage of developing an increasingly fibre optic network is that the cable itself is less likely to get stolen; well except for the fact that thieves can't tell the difference :glee: . In the meantime VM's customers should all be back online.
Related Virgin Service Status:
http://status-cable.virginmedia.com/vmstatus/serviceissue.do?ticket=1223182