ALL phone and internet services on Shetland have been restored after two underwater telecommunications cables were damaged.
Police declared a major incident on Thursday morning that the islands, which have a population of just under 23,000, suffered a “complete outage” which has affected connection to the mainland.
Shetland News reports that this is the third cable break and fault on a telecommunication cable around Shetland in just over a month.
BT had texted customers across Shetland to say it was aware of the “major outage” and that it was working to resolve the issue “as quickly as possible”.
In a statement released today, a spokesperson for BT said: “Following the damage to the Faroese Telecom cables linking Shetland with the Scottish Mainland (via Orkney and the Faroe Islands), engineers have been working flat out to restore broadband and mobile services to Shetland.
“While both cable links are being repaired by subsea engineers, engineers were able to reconnect all services via a temporary solution on Thursday afternoon.
“Further testing and monitoring overnight has shown that broadband services have remained stable, and we will continue to monitor this.”
Police set up a hub at a Tesco supermarket in Lerwick on Thursday as extra officers were drafted in to provide support.
The outage comes following damage to another cable last week which links Faroe and Shetland.
That cable is set to be repaired on Saturday with Faroese Telecom’s head of infrastructure Páll Vesturbú, saying it’s “rare” there are two issues at the same time.
He told the BBC: “The damage is affecting most of the telecom services to Shetland. There are some services still working but we will try to establish more services during the day if that’s possible.
“We expect it will be fishing vessels that damaged the cable but it is very rare that we have two problems at the same time.”
The BT spokesperson continued: “As a precaution, we have specialist teams in Shetland with satellite backup links should either of the subsea cables fail while they are being repaired.
“Faroese Telecom expect to complete the permanent repair to the first damaged cable by this weekend.
“The second damaged cable will then be examined by Faroese Telecom’s specialist subsea engineers.”
