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. ®

Related stories

Virgin Media taps Microsoft in lengthy email outage (18 February 2008)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/18/virgin_blueyonder_email_outage_microsoft/
Virgin Media network collapses nationwide (18 December 2007)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/18/virgin_media_national_outage/
Two UK web hosts go down (29 November 2007)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/29/murdochs_webhost_down/
Virgin Media downed by Manchester arsonists (1 November 2007)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/01/virgin_media_manchester_arson/
Fasthosts customer? Change your password now (18 October 2007)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/18/fasthost_police_hack_investigation/
Fasthosts admits email destruction fiasco (17 October 2007)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/17/fasthost_email_deletion/
Fasthosts update: still above water (24 July 2007)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/24/fasthosts_flood_problems/
Fasthosts hit by severe floods (23 July 2007)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/23/fasthosts_flood_downtime/
Fasthosts 'electrical issue' halts service for four hours (17 July 2007)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/17/fasthosts_electrical_downtime/
Fasthosts says sorry (9 January 2007)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/09/fasthosts_hit_by_ddos/
'Malicious damage' causes Telewest World Cup blackout (26 June 2006)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06/26/telewest_cable/
HD TV in the UK (30 May 2006)
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/05/30/hd_buyers_guide_uk/
Telewest scores HDTV deal for World Cup (15 May 2006)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/15/telewest_hdtv/
German ISP snaps up UK's Fasthosts (10 May 2006)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/10/fast_hosts/
NTL confirms 6,000 job losses (9 May 2006)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/09/ntl_job_cuts/
BT, NTL and AOL slammed in broadband survey (5 May 2006)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/05/uswitch_survey/
Ad watchdog fingers Telewest (3 May 2006)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/03/telewest_asa/
Telewest coughs to PVR 'teething problems' (25 April 2006)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/04/25/telewest_pvr/
Fasthosts ups reseller programme (19 April 2006)
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2006/04/19/fasthost_ups_resellers/