Posted: 10th Feb, 2012 By: MarkJ

Homes and businesses in the
Welwyn Garden City (
Hertfordshire) and surrounding areas (related dialling code -
01707) are being affected by a
serious outage of broadband ADSL services today.
The problem, which is believed to have
started at around 9pm on Thursday (9th February), was apparently caused by
malicious damage to five of BT's cables. Customers of several ISPs (e.g. AAISP , Eclipse Internet , BT etc.) are understood to have been affected by the situation.
Unfortunately the damage is so serious that some residents could be left without internet, and potentially also telephone, access until sometime on Saturday. The next official update from BT isn't expected until later today or tonight.
Major outages like this are most often caused by building mistakes (e.g. diggers cutting through vital telecoms lines), vandals or thieves whom pull the copper cables out of the ground before selling them on via scrap yards.
UPDATE 13th February 2012BT finally managed to resolve the problem late on Saturday (11th Feb 2012) afternoon (around 4pm).
UPDATE 13th February 2012 - 12:34pmThe
Watford Observer has confirmed that the cable damage was caused by an attempted cable theft.
Hertfordshire Police's Assistant Chief Constable, Alison Roome-Gifford, said:
"We can confirm that the problems have been caused by the attempted theft of cabling and this is being fully investigated by the dedicated Operation Devon (metal theft) team whose role it is to prevent and detect these crimes."