News / Internet back again
INTERNET services to thousands of customers in Shetland were restored at lunchtime on Thursday, though at a reduced speed.
The three and a half hour outage affected around 2,000 BT and 1,300 Shetland Broadband customers using the Faroese SHEFA-2 fibre optic cable.
The cable had already suffered damage earlier this week south of Orkney and traffic was being rerouted via Faroe and Iceland using the FARICE cable.
Then on Thursday FARICE developed a fault in a London data centre, taking internet users in the north Atlantic offline.
Ian Brown of Shetland Broadband said engineers from several countries were working to find a short term solution.
By 1.30pm services were slowly being restored as traffic was temporarily re-directed via a third cable, the Cantat cable between Faroe and Denmark.
The repair work on the London data centre will not be concluded until well into the night, while a cable laying ship to fix the SHEFA-2 cable off Orkney is not expected to arrive there before the weekend.
Brown said: “The circumstances that led to the loss of service were outwith our control, but nevertheless we would like to apologise for the inconvenience caused this morning.”
A BT spokesman added: “Around 2,000 broadband users in Lerwick lost service from around 10am this morning following the failure of a Faroese Telecom radio link.
“It follows the severing of a Faroese Telecom subsea cable off Burray on Monday.
“BT leases part of the cable from the Faroese company, who switched traffic over to their back-up radio route.
“That route has now failed and Faroese Telecom are working to restore service. Service was restored at 1.30pm after FT re-routed traffic via Denmark.”
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