Customers of several unbundled UK ISPs including Sky Broadband , Be Broadband , TalkTalk , UKOnline , Easynet and possibly more have been affected after vandals cut through a critical fibre cable. The issue has resulted in a significant outage of telephone and broadband services to exchanges in Dunstable, Hemel Hempstead, Leagrave and Luton.

The problem appears to have occurred at around midday yesterday and resulted in a flurry of activity as BTOpenreach responded to fix the problem. Exchanges in Letchworth , Harpenden , Hitchin and Houghton Regis were also down; albeit potentially not for the same reason.

At the time of writing the problem had not yet been resolved for all exchanges, though details are extremely sparse. Some other reports indicate that cable repairs have been hampered by flooding in the ducts going to several exchanges.


The outage does not appear to be affecting all of the related exchanges for all ISPs. BT Wholesale based ISPs, such as PlusNet , report that the Hemel Hempstead exchange is green (fine). We note that customers connected via Dunstable, Hemel Hempstead, Leagrave and Luton suffered a similar break earlier this month due to an accidental cable cut.

UPDATE 12:28pm

It has been confirmed that 2 out of 7 broken fibre cables in Luton have been fixed, and there are 3 more underway. It's hoped that most of the problem should be resolved by late afternoon today.

UPDATE 31st March 2010 - 11:17am

Problems with all of the exchanges should have been resolved after approximately 10am this morning or so we're told. Some of the listed exchanges are experiencing a few performance woes after the incident but the situation should improve as the day goes on.

Take note that the severe weather in some parts of the country today might hamper normal maintenance procedures.

UPDATE 31st March 2010 - 12:56pm

A fire at BT's Paddington building / node / exchange is causing major disruption today. This is not directly related to the above incident.