Sky broadband recovering after copper theft outage

Sky broadband has been offline in parts of London for the past two days after copper thieves meddled with infrastructure.

A spokeswoman for Sky told PC Pro that the ISP hoped to have connections back up by the end of today, saying it was working with BT’s infrastructure arm Openreach.

“We’re aware of the outage currently affecting broadband customers and are working with Openreach to repair the damage,” she said, pinning the blame on “malicious activity”.

She clarified that the damage was caused by cable theft, and said the delay in solving the issue was down to difficulty in accessing the affected location.

Sky customers turned to Twitter to complain, with some saying they hadn’t had broadband for more than 40 hours, while others reported that their connections were back up and running.

Sky’s support page said the areas affected by the outage included Battersea, Beulah Hill, Chiswick, Dartford, Ewell, Hampstead, Mitcham, Stamford Hill and Wimbledon.

Update: Sky has reported that, after tens of thousands of customers were initially affected, service has now returned to all areas aside from Chiswick, where 3,000 homes are still offline.

“The outage occurred after fibre cables forming part of BT Openreach’s network were cut by thieves attempting to steal copper from a site in West London (Great West Road) on 10 December,” Sky said. “BT Openreach has estimated that the remaining work should be completed later today (13 December).”

The statement added: “Please note, your broadband speeds may be slower than usual in the recently restored areas while the network resumes full service.”