Openreach issues statement after north Northumberland village went without internet for days

Like many other locations in north Northumberland, the electricity supply at Wark was cut off late on Sunday, January 21 due to Storm Isha.

The village was reconnected on the evening of Tuesday, January 23 and phonelines were restored. But there was still no internet connection. This was eventually restored late on Friday, January 26 and early into Saturday, January 27.

Openreach is responsible for the connection and it said a third party accidentally cutting through a cable that impacted broadband only was the reason.

Louise Cater, one of the people affected, said: “We, and our neighbours, reported the outage several times daily – to be fobbed off with the automated message saying it will be back on at a certain time later in the day, but this obviously did not happen.

“I was fortunate to find a BT engineer when returning home on Friday morning, sitting in his van not half a mile away. I stopped to ask him when we would likely be getting reconnected and I told him our address, and he said they’d had no notification of any problems in our area.”

A statement on behalf of Openreach said: “Damage to a cable during Storm Isha caused customers to lose access to both phone and broadband. Engineers repaired this fault as soon as it was safe to do so.

“Unfortunately, shortly after the repair was complete a third party accidentally cut through a cable that impacted broadband only. This fault wasn’t reported to us until January 26 and we immediately sent engineers out to repair the damage, with service back up and running by the following day.”