Colt Telecom cable cut mystery

Updated: Colt Telecom customers might be finding themselves without internet access today after an undersea cable was cut.

A spokeswoman was unable to give us any details beyond admitting there "were some issues". But Register readers have been told that a severed undersea cable running between the UK and mainland Europe is the cause of the problem. The telecoms provider does not appear to have a network status page on its website.

One reader told us: "Our company has a leased line with them and we've been down since 8am. We asked what was going on and apparently it's 'all hands on deck' due to a Europe side outage across their network." They were told a power surge at their London exchange caused the interconnects to fail.

Another reader said London, Geneva and Brussels had all been hit. They added: "We've just had to give up trying to work in our London office as our internet is down - the line that the office owners are giving us is that the main undersea cable connecting the UK to Europe has been cut."

Colt has 18 data centres across Europe and, from their network map, two connections from London to Ghent and Brussels and four trans-Atlantic links.

Colt Telecom has promised to tell us more when they know more - we'll update this story then.

A Colt spokeswoman sent us the following statement:

COLT is currently experiencing service problems in some parts of its network which have been affecting some of our data services in seven cities across Europe since early this morning. Most services remain unaffected. The cities affected are London, Brussels, Geneva, Zurich, Milan, Frankfurt, and Amsterdam.

Most COLT customers are unaffected and we are liaising closely with those customers who are to minimise the impact on them.

COLT quickly activated its contingency planning processes. This issue is being treated with the utmost urgency and we are working through a systematic process, liaising with external hardware suppliers and technical experts, to identify and resolve the issue.

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