West mainland phone and internet services restored after outage

Phones and broadband in the west mainland suffered an outage last night when “a power cable feeding core equipment in an exchange burnt out”, according to BT.

Phone services in and around Stromness and Graemesay, as well as broadband services in Sandwick and Finstown were affected.

A spokesman from the service provider said an engineer was in the air from Inverness to Stromness, due to arrive at 5pm but the helicopter suffered “a technical issue”, forcing the pilot to return to base.

Local engineers working with a power specialist from Sanday restored services from 9.25pm last night. BT has apologised for any inconvenience caused during the loss of services.