Karoo, Hull's monopoly ADSL provider, has been hit by a major outage today that has forced much of the city's population offline.

The firm sent us this statement:

There is currently a major fault affecting a key part of our infrastructure which means that a large number of Karoo and KC Broadband customers are experiencing problems connecting to the internet. Our engineers are working to rectify the fault and we aim to resume normal service as soon as possible. In the meantime we would like to apologise for the inconvenience this issue has caused to our customers

A spokeswoman wouldn't say where in the network the problem is. Karoo's status page says engineers anticipated a fix taking seven hours when the fault hit this morning.

Karoo is part of the K-Com group, formerly known as Kingston Communications. Hull's local telephone company was never subsumed into BT during nationalisation, and it became famous for its white phone boxes and later for pioneering UK broadband.

It's now a source of irritation for Hull's internet users. As a monopoly it has higher prices than national ISPs. K-Com says it's open to competitors renting its infrastructure à la BT Wholesale and Openreach, but nobody's interested. ®

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