South London broadband knocked out by hungry rodents

Sebastian Anthony

Barcroft Media via Getty Images

A major telephone and broadband outage hit areas of South London last night after "rodents" nibbled through a fibre optic cable owned by Virgin Media.

Both Sky and TalkTalk acknowledged the issue, which mostly affected users in Lambeth and bordering areas. Brixton, Vauxhall, Streatham, Clapham, Battersea, Dulwich, Tulse Hill, and Forest Hill were all affected, though it isn't clear to what extent. (For what it's worth, I have a BT broadband connection in Brixton and didn't experience an outage.)

TalkTalk reported that the outage was caused by a damaged fibre optic cable owned by Virgin Media, though Virgin Media itself hasn't officially acknowledged the problem. "Customers ... are currently experiencing a loss of service due to damaged Virgin Media cabling in the local vicinity which is used by TalkTalk and other providers," reads a TalkTalk status update from last night.

Update: Virgin Media has now confirmed the fibre break. TalkTalk uses the link to connect its hardware, which is located in an Openreach exchange, to its core network. The link is not used for Virgin Media's own broadband service.

Sky, which used Twitter to deliver an admirably steady stream of updates about the outage, even provided the cause of the connectivity issue: "Work continues on repairing broken fibre cables. We have identified the cause of the fault, to be the work of rodents."

"Rodents" is a little bit ambiguous, but that's probably just because the engineering team doesn't contain a rodentologist who can accurately identify the bite marks. Presumably London's healthy population of rats are to blame, though I personally hope that it was Clapham's wild pack of capybaras.

Update: An inside source has confirmed with Ars that the damage was not caused by capybaras, but that same source declined to speculate on what member of the rodent family was behind the attack.

Chewing through a fibre-optic cable is tough, though not impossible. Larger cables tend to be heavily armoured, but smaller runs—especially in ducts, along poles, and in other areas where building works aren't expected—are usually much more fragile. As for why a rat would chew through a fibre cable... well, we'll probably never know.

At 10:30am this morning, Sky issued another update to say that service had returned to normal. Apparently the cable was physically broken at 9:25pm last night, and engineers arrived on the scene by 11pm.

To read more about fibre cables and Internet infrastructure, read our in-depth explainer on how the Internet works.