Posted: 26th May, 2011 By: MarkJ

A major break at one of BT's fibre optic cables, which occurred at around 8am yesterday and was apparently caused by "
malicious damage", has resulted in serious disruption to the broadband services of several ISPs (e.g. O2 , Be Broadband and AAISP etc.) in and around the
Harlow (North of London) area.
AAISP Status Update
In regards to the unplanned outage in the Harlow, we want to inform you that BT have located the fault to be 100 metres away from their Fibrenet site in Harlow. There has been malicious damage to one of their 240 fibre cables. BT cable jointers are on site to replace a 200 metre length of cable which is estimated to take up to 12hrs.
The situation now appears to have been largely resolved. Sadly Harlow isn't the only part of the country to be suffering problems. BT has been forced to declare a
Matter Beyond Our Reasonable Control (MBORC) incident in parts of
Northern England and
Scotland.
It's understood that a bout of
severe weather (high winds) has tripled BT Openreach's fault stack. As a result BT has said that it is "
implementing contingency plans to bring in additional resources so we can recover service as quickly as possible."