Further telecoms outages as subsea cable repairs continue

A cable ship carries out repairs. Photo: Ronnie Robertson.

Further communication outages have been reported amid ongoing repairs to the subsea cable that was damaged last week.

Openreach said a “small number” of residents may be without services from some providers while the permanent repairs are carried out. 

The southern section of the Shefa2 cable was damaged last Thursday leaving much of Shetland without phones, internet or mobile service for around 16 hours.

Services were restored using a “temporary solution” until a complete repair could be carried out. 

Faroese Telecom, which manages the network, completed repairs to a damaged section of cable north of Shetland last Saturday. 

Its teams began work on the southern repairs on Wednesday.

Openreach said that “for technical reasons” the temporary fix cannot be maintained while this work is done.

“Subsea repairs, which are weather dependent, are currently ongoing so there will be some disruption until this work is complete,” it said. 

“We’re sorry for this further break in service, which is beyond our control.

“The majority of traffic, which has resilient routing, is unaffected.”

BT said it had a resilient link for its customers via the northern cable.

“BT customers have had working service since we restored the link last Thursday afternoon,” it said.

A progress update on the repair work is expected this afternoon.