Virgin Media’s broadband outage in Scotland due to rats

It’s extremely infuriating to have your broadband connection suddenly cut off in the middle of a video conference or when you’re about to send off an important email to a client. Sometimes, outages are caused by network or infrastructure problems that a provider may be experiencing.

However, most of the time, these outages are caused by circumstances that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have no control or strict hold of.

This was the case a few weeks ago when subscribers of BT Broadband experienced broadband service outage due to a power failure at an exchange in Birmingham. This time around, though, it’s competing service provider Virgin Media that’s going through a bit of a problem, not because of power failure, but because of rats.

Yes, you read that right: rats. Users in Scotland experienced a brief broadband service outage when rats chewed through and damaged the operator’s fibre optic cables. A Virgin Media spokesperson confirmed the outage but claimed that services have already been restored, stating: “Full service was resorted on Tuesday evening and customers are no longer affected.”

Virgin Media has released a statement about the incident, which said: “We’re aware that a number of customers in the Kirkcaldy, Glenrothes and Leven areas may have experienced intermittent loss of their Virgin Media services from Monday morning until Tuesday evening.”

The statement continued: “The loss of service was due to rodent damage to some underground cabling,” it said. “On Monday morning our engineers were on site as soon as possible and worked at the highest priority to repair the damage, with service restored early evening on Monday.”

It seemed that the rodents were not satisfied at chewing on the cables on Monday, because they were back for another round on Tuesday, doing more damage to Virgin’s fibre cables. “Further damage was incurred on Tuesday afternoon and our engineers returned to repair the damage. We’ve now put additional measures in place to prevent further damage to our cables to avoid further disruption for our customers. We’re extremely sorry for any inconvenience caused.”

Approximately 100 users were affected because of this outage.

Source – eWeek Europe