“Stormy weather” to blame for 999 service outage

Stormy weather has been blamed for an outage of the 999 emergency service, which affected landline telephones in Hoy and Longhope, as well as John O’Groats on Saturday.

BT has said today that the outage was due to a power failure at Hoy Radio Transmission Station.

Power was lost at around 8pm on Friday night and on Saturday a BT chartered helicopter picked up spare rectifiers from Kirkwall and flew them to Hoy, where engineers restored power and service at around 3pm.

Some broadband customers in Kirkwall were also affected by the power failure.

BT has apologised saying they are sorry for any inconvenience caused.