Sky broadband has blamed network problems, not censorship, for customers's inability to get onto RapidShare and other sites, mostly related to file sharing.

The problems last week led to hysterical emails and forum posts accusing Sky of "censoring the internet". Image files from Wordpress also fell foul of Sky's apparent fault.

A Sky spokesman said: "Unfortunately we did experience a brief network issue which temporarily blocked some customers’ access to Rapidshare. Our engineers resolved the issue this afternoon and all customers should now be able to access Rapidshare sites.

"We are monitoring the network to ensure this does not reoccur."

There were suggestions that the sites were blocked because they appeared, wrongly, on an IWF watchlist. ®

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