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Cable thieves hang up on BT, cause MAJOR outage

There's gold in that there copper

BT is suffering a big outage in a number of areas throughout Blighty, after thieves severed the telecoms giant's fibre cable in an effort to nick copper wiring from the company on Monday.

TalkTalk, which is a BT Openreach customer, said on its status page that its service was affected by a "major cable break".

BT told The Register:

Openreach have suffered malicious cuts to underground cabling which is affecting some services.

Our engineers are onsite and in the process of changing out the damaged sections of cabling but there’s a lot of complex work to do. Many people will have seen their services restored already, and the engineers are working around the clock doing all they can to reconnect the remainder as quickly as possible.

A small number of unlucky BT customers won't see their services restored until Friday, the telco warned, while others will slowly be able to reconnect today.

One reader told El Reg that the outage was "causing congestion, phone and broadband service quality issues, and in some cases, call failure with phone services for the duration of this incident."

BT asked Brits to "be vigilant and report any suspicious behaviour in or around street cabinets or manhole covers immediately".

It added:

The theft of metal is a continuing problem in the UK, affecting many industry sectors. A BT partnership with Crimestoppers offers up to £1,000 reward for information leading to arrests and subsequent successful convictions. People can call anonymously and free on 0800 555 111.

BT said it has a range of security measures in place to help it quickly report cable theft to police. ®

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