Damage to subsea cable leads to internet outages

MANY Shetlanders have been left without internet since Saturday after a subsea internet cable was damaged overnight.

Shetland Telecom said that a section of the Shefa-2 fibre optic cable, which links Faroe Islands, Shetland and Orkney to Scotland, had been damaged at around 3am on Saturday morning.

This has now been confirmed by Páll Højgaard Vesturbú, Shefa’s managing director.

He said the Shefa-2 cable was damaged around nine kilometre off the coast of Orkney. The cause of the damage is still unknown.

“We have contacted our subcontractor to carry out the repair, and we expect a repair vessel to be on site by the middle of next week,” Vesturbú told Shetland News.

“In the meantime, we are working to restore the lost connections in Shetland via an alternative route.”

A number of people have reported being without internet this morning, spanning from Lerwick to Scalloway and out to the West Mainland.

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It is unclear how many people have been affected, though telephone networks have seemingly avoided the outage.

Shetland Home Co is one business which has said it has been affected, writing that its usual card machine was down and that cash would be preferable today.

It comes less than three years after the same cable was previously damaged by a fishing vessel, leaving large numbers of Shetland homes and businesses without connectivity.

Openreach, which maintains the UK’s broadband network, and Shefa have been approached for comment.