Community council to raise concerns with Ofcom over network outages
LERWICK Community Council is to write to communications regulator Ofcom to raise concerns about a recent telecommunications outage.
A major incident was declared at the Gilbert Bain Hospital on Sunday 24 May after the widespread power and network outage across Shetland.
SSEN Distribution apologised to people in Shetland for the outage, which occurred at around 3am, and said it had launched a full investigation.
Lerwick Community Council chairman Jim Anderson said they would be writing a “letter of concern” to Ofcom about how the incident was allowed to happen.
Monday’s meeting heard that SSEN fail safes were believed not to have worked as expected in the aftermath of the outage.
But it was the loss of telecommunications networks across Shetland, leaving some people with no way of contacting one another, which raised most concern.
Anderson said he wanted to see Ofcom do more in such situations.
“Ofcom was created to do a job,” he said. “They have been a bit lax.”
He said Ofcom could be “hammering” major communication companies for loss of service to Shetland, citing two incidents involving damage to the Shefa-2 subsea cable last year.
SSEN Distribution said a localised fault had occurred on the network in mainland Shetland late last month, and that the “systems in place to isolate this fault and prevent further disruption on the network did not operate as they should”.
NHS Shetland announced a major incident at the hospital as a result of the outages.
It said that though power was only disrupted momentarily before a back-up generator kicked in, there was an “ongoing loss of phones and the bleep system” at the hospital.
“Because the situation outweighed the available resources, a major incident at hospital level was triggered,” NHS Shetland said.
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“Patients were unaffected by the outage, and everything was back up and running as normal by 6am.”
SSEN Distribution said it would be in touch with mobile phone operators “to support any reviews they choose to conduct into their own contingency plans”.
“Resilience measures for mobile phone masts and fixed-line telecoms are the responsibility of the operators of these networks.
“At the end of 2026, Shetland’s standby project is due to come into service, which will connect Shetland’s distribution network to the new transmission network. This will further improve the islands’ resilience.”
SSEN Distribution reassured customers that its contingencies for restoring the network “worked as expected”, with supplies coming back on in stages.
It said the majority of people were reconnected within three hours, with all supplies restored shortly after 7am.
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