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Fasthosts floored by Telewest cable cut

Plans network upgrade

Fasthosts - which describes itself as the "UK's number 1 web host" and "home to more websites than any other provider" - has blamed Telewest's network blackout yesterday for its service going titsup for around 10 hours.

But in a move to prevent such an outage hitting the firm again it announced plans to carry out a network upgrade over the next fortnight.

El Reg has received a number of emails from hacked off Fasthosts punters complaining that their service went belly-up at about 3pm yesterday - and did not flicker back to life until about 1am Monday morning.

Fasthosts - the Gloucestershire-based internet firm that was snapped up by German outfit United Internet AG in May for £61.5m - declined to say how many of its customers were hit by yesterday's down time.

Instead, the firm told us: "Some of our customers experienced a disruption to their service on Sunday, 25 June. This has now been resolved.

"A major nationwide failure at one of our internet connection providers caused a routing failure in our core network, resulting in some services becoming unavailable. This was a major failure caused by structural damage to the Telewest fibre network.

"This is not the level of service our customers expect from us and we are taking immediate measures to upgrade our network so that, in the highly unlikely event of a similar occurrence in the future, our service will not be affected. We expect these upgrades to be completed within the next 14 days."

The firm added then extended its "sincere apologies to all our affected customers".

Around 100,000 homes in the Bristol area were left without TV or internet services yesterday after two cables belonging to cableco NTL:Telewest were "maliciously damaged".

Subscribers to the NTL:Telewest service lost their service at around 3pm yesterday afternoon - just an hour before England's crucial World Cup match against Ecuador.

By around 4am this morning engineers had managed to restore services to around half of those affected. The rest should be back up and running later today. ®

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