Customers in Eastbourne left 'angry' after having no internet

Customers with the Eastbourne-based internet provider Lightning Fibre claim they were left without internet connection all day Monday, October 26 and further claimed the company had said they won’t have internet the day after also.

In an email seen by the Herald, one customer Phill Hall said: “We lost our broadband connection in the morning, and so couldn't work all day. Lightning fibre customer services were unable to provide any information about what had happened or how long the service failure would last.

“We finally got an email at the end of the day to say the problem would last another day. When you're working from home and depend on the internet, this simply isn’t good enough.”

Another customer added: “Total loss of broadband for 48 hours has caused enormous problems - this isn’t just being unable to play games or buying stuff online, this means no work and no pay for many people.”

In response to this a Lightning Fibre spokesperson said: “Our network monitoring systems identified that 138 customers in the Old Town area of Eastbourne lost their broadband service at 10:54am on Monday, October 26.

"This outage was incurred due to an external organisation damaging our network. By 12:25pm we had engineers in the area investigating the issue. Every customer was emailed three times on Monday - with a notification of the issue and two further updates. Additional updates have been sent.

“We have added updates to our service issues page on our website and social media throughout this period too. Customers have been coming back online this afternoon- and we expect all homes to have full broadband service again by 6pm on Tuesday October 27."