Thousands of Sky Broadband and Virgin Media across south London have found themselves with no internet access for more than 24 hours after a construction worker accidentally cut through a fibre cable in the area.
Reports of connection loss started around 15:00 BST on Tuesday, with customers flooding the Sky and Virgin Twitter accounts with calls for information and fixes.
It was three hours after the connections disappeared that Sky finally updated their service status page to say that engineers were onsite and working on the issue, causing much frustration from customers.
Virgin Media support first claimed that the issue would be fixed by 21:00 on Tuesday, but now say that they hope the connection will be repaired by 20:00 today.
The widespread outage caused by a single cable being severed demonstrates the fragility of the UK’s broadband network, upon which an increasingly number of people and businesses rely.
The areas affected include Battersea, Brixton, Nine Elms, South Clapham, and Vauxhall.
