Peter Gabriel's website and the website and ticket buying site for Womad, the world music festival he founded, are back online today after their servers and routers were stolen at the weekend.

Opal Telecom, which hosts the servers in High Wycombe, was unwilling to comment, but a spokesman for Gabriel's music company Real World said thieves got into the data centre on Sunday night/Monday morning.

He said: "We've got pretty much everything back online now including Peter's site and ticketing for Womad. And we can reassure people that all the financial details were stored elsewhere in a secure location and are safe. The thieves took servers and some core networking kit - routers. Despite the conspiracy theories we don't think we were targeted, it was just a hardware theft."

He thanked the tech team for doing such a good job of getting the site back online despite the Bank Holiday and for emailing all customers to reassure them their data was safe.

Robbers have targeted data centres before. Last year, thieves tricked security guards at a London centre by dressing as police officers. CI Host in Chicago was also hit.

Thieves are typically after hardware rather than data. ®

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