A suspected arson at a Manchester electricity substation left thousands of Virgin Media customers in the North West without TV and broadband for several hours overnight.

The Halloween attack in the Miles Platting area left 60,000 homes in the centre of the city without power at about 7.30pm. They were all back on the grid by 9pm.

A spokesman for the firm said today that most of its users were back online by 2am. He was not able to confirm suggestions from Reg readers in the area that its problems were caused by the air conditioning for its servers being knocked out.

The Virgin Media status page for the incident is here, though it hasn't been updated since 8.29pm yesterday.

There's more on the arson from the Manchester Evening News here. ®

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