Cable and Wireless left cableless by double line break

Double and quits

By Chris Williams • Get more from this author

Posted in Telecoms, 2nd July 2008 10:22 GMT

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Several of Cable and Wireless' large corporate customers were booted offline on Moday night when its Leeds data centres fell to an unlikely double cable break.

The two breaks were more than 100 miles apart, in the Northampton and Runcorn areas. They cut off two data centres Cable and Wireless picked up when it bought Energis in 2005.

The firm sent us this statement:

[On Monday] night, Cable&Wireless' UK network sustained two cable breaks in the Northampton and Runcorn areas. The breaks occurred separately.
Regrettably, the breaks did result in some disturbance to services to a number of our customers. We immediately deployed teams to repair the breaks and are glad to report full service was restore within 5 hours.

Cable&Wireless regards customer service as our core priority and apologises to all customers who were impacted.

According to our tipster, the customers affected by the outage included electronics retail group DSG, Boots pharmacy, Freeserve and dozens of ecommerce and gambling sites. ®

See what The Register's experts have to say on application security