British Telecom has today confirmed that a major flood on 31 March has affected over 400 telephone exchanges in the UK causing severe disruption to telephone and broadband services. The problem began in an exchange in the west of London but very quickly there were knock on effects to many other exchanges around the UK. As a consequence BT has been working around the clock to restore broadband and telephone services.
While there is no doubt that services will be restored in the short-term the impact of the problem in just one exchange in London further reflects the growing dependence we have upon the telecoms arena. There were reports of shops having to accept cash as opposed to credit and debit cards because many payment systems, relying upon the telephone network, were unable to contact data centers and complete financial transactions.
It is unclear at this stage exactly what happened but there is an indication it may well have been linked to the very unseasonable weather conditions in some areas of the UK. Despite the fact that British Telecom, amongst other telephone service providers in the UK, invests billions upon billions of pounds into its networks on regular basis, nothing is foolproof.