A mass outage of internet and phone services which affected thousands of Nottinghamshire homes and business is now thought to have been caused when cabling was cut by accident.
Around 10,000 properties were affected across Rushcliffe and south Nottingham after critical cabling was damaged on Sunday morning (October 14).
Most had services restored in full by Monday evening.
Initially Openreach, the company in charge of large parts of national broadband infrastructure, said the problem had been caused by “malicious damage” to cables close to Trent Bridge in Nottingham.
But in an update on Tuesday, a spokesperson said the firm now believed the damage had been caused by an accident.
An Openreach spokesperson said: “We initially believed the cable cut to be criminal damage, further investigation means we think this could be accidental damage that wasn’t reported to us immediately.”
Around 700m worth of cabling had to be replaced following the incident on Sunday. Engineers who worked throughout Monday restored services in stages throughout the afternoon and evening.
Parts of the Meadows, West Bridgford, Radcliffe-on-Trent, Bingham and Cotgrave were among the areas affected.
Many businesses were unable to receive contactless card payments and GP practices were also affected.
Nottinghamshire Police confirmed they are not investigating, as they’d had no report of criminal damage related to the incident.
Openreach thanked people affected for their “patience and understanding” when announcing services had been restored on Monday night.
