Damaged subsea cable disrupts broadband and phone services

A ship carrying out repairs to the damaged cable last year. Photo: Ronnie Robertson.

A damaged subsea cable has caused broadband and phone service disruption – though Shetland remains unaffected.

Openreach confirmed a fibreoptic cable had been damaged off the Orkney coast.

“We are continuing to closely monitor the impact on our North Scotland network,” it said in a statement.

The troubles come less than four months after severed subsea cables caused a communications blackout in Shetland, with emergency services declaring a major incident.

Services were restored in around 16 hours, although intermittent outages continued for several days while repairs were carried out to the Shefa-2 cable.

The latest damage has been caused to a separate cable, which connects Orkney to the UK mainland.

Some customers in the Thurso and Stromness areas have been affected.

Mainland customers were complaining yesterday of having been left cut off for three days.

One said: “They sorted Shetland a lot quicker.”

Openreach said: “Subsea repairs are complicated and we’re working to get everything in place to allow the work to go ahead safely as soon as possible.

“Meantime, we’re exploring other options to get people reconnected. We’re sorry for any ongoing disruption caused by this cable damage.”

BT said none of its customers had been affected as it usually sought to buy resilient links from network suppliers.

Meanwhile, health officials warned this week that the planned switch-off of analogue phone services could leave services vulnerable to communication outages.

Integration Joint Board chief officer Brian Chittick said teams were seeking to learn lessons from the outages in October as well as the problems caused by the bad weather in December.

A member of staff has been appointed to oversee the digital switchover, which is set to happen before the end of 2025.