Sky customers across Liverpool and Manchester have been hit by an ongoing and widespread outage that has knocked out their broadband and phone lines.
Customers in the north west of England were initially warned about the prospect of downtime yesterday in a Sky user forum post, which said they may experience problems accessing the internet between midnight and 6am because of essential maintenance.
However, at the time of writing, users in Liverpool and Manchester were still experiencing problems while trying to access the internet via Sky's broadband services or make calls using its network.
Many of the firm's customers have taken to Twitter to air their frustration at the ongoing connectivity issues.
For example, there have been complaints from home workers about how the downtime is affecting their productivity, and calls for Sky to compensate customers that may have lost business as a result of it.
Looks like sky broadband is broke in Manchester & Liverpool.. brilliant, that's well & truly screwed me up. I'm trying to run a businessJamie Ryan (@JmeRyn) October 17, 2014
Sky attempt maintenance in Manchester and manage to kill phone and broadband for the entire North West. Classic Sky...Jonny Kermode (@jonnykermode) October 17, 2014
#sky #broadband please turn it off then on at the back please. This will fix #manchester Internet problem.howieboss (@howieboss) October 17, 2014
The broadcaster has issued a series of status updates on its website, where it explained the problems have been caused by a "multiple exchange" outage, affecting more than 35 of its sites.
At present it's not known exactly how many Sky customers in these areas have been affected, but the company has admitted that a "large number" are experiencing problems.
In the most recent status update on the company's website, Sky assured its customers the situation is being tackled.
"The latest update we have is that our engineers have identified the location of the fault and are currently working to re-patch affected fibres in order to restore service to the network. We will provide a further update on progress soon," it said.
"We're sorry for the continued inconvenience caused," it added.
