Blueyonder customers in the south east face severe disruption to their broadband service this weekend, following the theft of 23 servers early Friday morning from parent company Telewest's network centre in Basildon.

Other "important equipment" was vandalised by the robbers, Telewest said in a statement obtained by ISP Review.

The stolen and trashed equipment "ran our high speed Internet and the interactive element of our digital television service in the in south-east region.

"We will be working through the weekend and bringing in equipment from other areas to restore service as soon as possible which we expect will take approximately 48 hours.

"We apologise for this inconvenience, and appreciate how frustrating loss of service is."

Sympathy all round, etc, etc. But it does seem surprising that thieves could just walk in to Telewest centre and nick so much equipment - even if it was under cover of darkness.

Our servers live at Level 3's co-location facility in London, and before that they were housed at PSI Net's co-lo in Cambridge. The pair of them are like Fort Knox. ®