"Could you please tell everybody my web site is down?" This is not ordinarily the kind of request you get from the boss of a giant online reselling outfit, but it is precisely what dabs.com CEO Dave Atherton just asked us, and we are happy to oblige. He has, after all the HP Halloween Ball to attend tonight (another one of those events where our invite seems mysteriously to have gone astray), and he's not looking forward to: "Have you gone bust? I tried to get onto your web site just now, and couldn't."

So no, dabs.com has not gone bust. But somewhere in the Greater Manchester area an unidentified JCB or similar has neatly chopped the pipe that leads from Dabs to Nextra, so there's no bandwidth, no orders being taken, no site. Oh, and no company email either. Fortunately the phones still work, Dave tells us, so the staff can keep themselves busy saying no when people call to say: "Have you gone bust? I've just tried to email you..."

Atherton says Dabs has daily sales of about £500,000, which today is obviously not happening, that he's currently got 30 of his 200 staff sitting idle, and that he expects severe knock-on effects on service on Monday and Tuesday, when the site should be back up. We get the feeling that some careless person in the Greater Manchester area is like to be hearing from Dabs real soon now... ®