Manchester Telecommunications Failure Report

Manchester Tunnel Fire, March 2004, UK

Communications failure causes widespread disruption

Manchester’s communications infrastructure was thrown into chaos at the end of March with a widespread telecoms failure affecting over 130,000 lines.

The cause was a tunnel fire in the early hours of Monday 29th March in an underground tunnel many meters below surface level. Access difficulties and safety concerns for Fire Fighters added to the difficulties in bringing the blaze under control.

The UK is not alone in facing in facing a new age in terrorist threat, the risks around the world are greater than ever before and it is our responsibility to directly address the real dangers posed

Business and residential customers across a wide area of the North West of England suffered the complete loss of both voice and data capability, in most cases for over a week, and a cascade effect was seen with data hosting and call centres located within the affected area extending the effects across Britain and other countries.

Some disruption was also caused to mobile networks and Emergency Services Radio Networks. Estimates for the losses caused by this event are already ranging from £4.5 - £8 million a day, although once the full effects have been calculated we expect to see a total impact in the region of £50-60million. BT has commented saying that ‘an investigation is underway and once the facts have been established they will consider the issue of Compensation’.

However, from experience of previous disruptions of this we expect levels of compensation to be very low, typically some £50 per day affected for businesses and much less for residential customers. Some of those affected may be able to claim for business interruption through their insurance policies, but again previous experience points to difficulties in claiming and long settlement times for those ultimately successful.

The broader issues raised by this event are extensive and through our recent Telecoms & Resilience group activities we have highlighted the vulnerability of organisations of ALL types to serious disruption caused by Telecoms failure.

Last November at our Telecoms and Resilience event, the Continuity Forum, Home Office and OFCOM urged business to urgently take greater steps to ensure Telecoms Resilience throughout their operations. Continuity Forum research has shown that in most businesses, even those with BC plans, very little provision is made for Telecoms Continuity. Service Providers were also urged to increase their abilities to work with Planners and increase both the access to, and accuracy of, information needed to identify single points of failure.

Critically a number of organisations have contacted the Continuity Forum highlighting the effect of NOT having access to this data. They had all implemented a dual supply policy for much of their critical communications, only to discover through this event that the routing taken by suppliers was common resulting in complete failure. Needless to say these organisations are very disturbed by this experience and want suppliers to work together to avoid a repeat instance of this event and they are also intending to vigorously pursue legal action should ‘significant and substantial compensation’ not be forthcoming in the very near future.

The cascade effect also extended the reach of this event to international companies in the US and beyond, even reaching Afghanistan! Web servers located in the region were affected and this caused serious disruption to many smaller businesses using the services of ISP’s to host and manage Web sites and email. Speaking to one of the affected companies in Surrey the Forum was told that they had lost revenue amounting to approximately £10,000 per day and they had had great difficulties in contacting their ISP to resolve matters. The Continuity Forum has commenced the Case Study process and will report back to members on the effects of this event and the lessons that can be learned from it.

If you have any information on the effects on your organisation we would be delighted to hear from you, as always, in the strictest confidence. Contact the Forum directly on 020 8993 1599 or info@continuityforum.org