Tens of thousands of Sky customers have been left without broadband access and phone lines for around three days after suspected thieves cut through fibre cables looking for copper to steal.
BT Openreach, which looks after the cables, said that a "malicious attack" was responsible for the outage at an exchange in Brentford. Intruders sliced through a manhole cover on Tuesday night, according to reports by the Guardian.
The suspects are thought to have been looking for copper cable, which commands a high price on the black market, but only found fibre cables, which have no value as a raw material.
The outage affected some 37,000 users in Stamford Hill, Dartford, Ewell, Mitcham, Wimbledon, Hampstead, Battersea, Chiswick and Beulah Hill.
Yesterday, BT engineers managed to restore service to 27,000 customers but for 10,000 users in Stamford Hill, Ewell and Chiswick, Openreach estimated it would take a further 48 hours to repair the damage, meaning it will be Friday evening before services are back up and running.
Angry users flooded Sky's support forums to vent their frustrations over the delay in getting service back and lack of details updates.
"For me, money won't fix the time I've lost and am still losing every hour. What makes me angry the most is the lack of communication," said Rebecca Clarke on Sky's help forum. "No update on the status website since 1pm yesterday. Not even an explanation of what has happened. "
A Sky spokesperson said: "Following a malicious attack on Openreach's network, there's currently a broadband and phone outage in parts of London. Sky and other companies are affected. Openreach engineers are working to repair the network as a matter of urgency. We apologise to all affected customers."
Sky added that the delay in repairing the damage was down to the difficulty in accessing the location.
