Telephone and internet services have been restored to Shetland after two subsea cables were damaged, leaving the islands nearly cut off from the outside world.
Police Scotland declared a major incident on Thursday after the cable connecting Shetland to mainland Scotland was affected early that morning, leaving many islanders without mobile services, internet and in some cases landlines.
Engineers had already been waiting to repair another subsea cable to the mainland, running via the Faroe islands, which had been damaged last week. There were fears the connections might not be restored until Saturday.
BT Group said its engineers had reinstated services with a temporary fix but were continuing to work “flat out” to fully repair the breaks, blamed by UK and Faroese officials on fishing vessels trawling or dredging for catch.
“While both cable links are being repaired by subsea engineers, engineers were able to reconnect all services via a temporary solution on Thursday afternoon,” a spokesperson said.
“Further testing and monitoring overnight has shown that broadband services have remained stable, and we will continue to monitor this. 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.”
Faeroese Telecom’s head of infrastructure, Páll Vesturbú, said the damage to the mainland link had affected fibres in the cable, but “they were not cut off”.
“We have reason to believe that the cable was damaged by a fishing vessel,” he told the BBC. “There was also an incident last week, and we also believe that this was caused by a fishing vessel.”
On Thursday, police had put on extra high visibility patrols across the islands and had urged residents to check on vulnerable or elderly neighbours and relatives, in case they needed help.
The outage left Shetland Islands council without landline services. Cashpoints stopped working. Aircraft continued to operate from Sumburgh airport on Thursday but all network and mobile links at the airport had failed.
