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Thousands of homes and businesses across Shetland, which is a remote UK subarctic archipelago that resides north of the Scottish mainland, have suffered disruption to their broadband services this weekend after part of the main SHEFA-2 (Faroese Telecom) submarine (subsea) fibre optic cable was damaged. Premises on the Orkney Islands were also hit.
Faroese Telecom’s SHEFA-2 cable reaches Shetland via two landing sites, including one stretch that goes North West up to the Faroe Islands and another cable that runs south to connect Orkney and the Scottish Mainland. In addition, BT recently deployed an additional subsea fibre link between Shetland and Orkney as part of the ongoing R100 project.
The latest situation started at around 3am yesterday (Saturday 26th July 2025) after damage occurred on the section of SHEFA-2 that runs between Orkney and Banff in Aberdeenshire. Shetland Telecom promptly stated that their own internet customers were “unaffected as traffic switched to our resilient route via Faroe“. But the situation for Openreach (BT)’s local fibre broadband network was more problematic.
A Spokesperson for Openreach said:
“We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience, the damage to a subsea cable from Orkney to Banff, has caused from Saturday morning. Customers can still make landline calls, and whilst we’re constantly assessing customer impact, we believe up to 10,000 customers in Faroe, Shetland and Orkney islands could have disruption to their broadband services.
We’re working on repairs as soon as we can and will update further once we can confirm our specific work and timeline. Anyone experiencing any issues should report it to their service provider for further investigation as usual.”
The cause of the break has not yet been ascertained, although the most likely reason tends to be ships dragging their anchors across the cable or fishing trawlers dragging large nets in the same way (fishing fleets usually know where the cables run, but not every trawler pays proper attention and accidents can happen). Some past cable breaks have often been attributed to these, although in the current climate nobody can rule out the potential for sabotage (here).
The latest such incident occurred in October 2022 and was much more disruptive because it involved two separate cable breaks that hit within a relatively short space of time (here). Such breaks can sometimes take several weeks to fully repair, which is partly due to the delay in arranging for a cable repair ship to be dispatched, as well as uncertainty around the scale of damage and weather. Repair ships have recently been in quite high demand.
According to Faroese Telecom, the location of the damage was some 9km off the coast of Orkney, and they currently expect a repair vessel to be on site by the middle of next week. The outage does not appear to be impacting fixed line phone (voice) services. We should add that residents on Shetland can now also purchase packages via Starlink’s LEO satellite broadband network, which may be a useful alternative for redundancy.
The outage comes shortly after Vodafone (VodafoneThree) announced that they had begun a new “feasibility study”, which will explore the possibility and cost of deploying a new subsea fibre optic cable system to help transform broadband and mobile connectivity on the Shetland Islands and boost resilience (here).