Thousands of homes and businesses were left without broadband access for days following a major network fault.

Some 4,000 Manx Telecom business and domestic customers across the island were affected by the service outage which first hit at 5pm on Monday night.

It proved a major headache for many people who are still working from home following the Covid-19 crisis.

The issue also left MiCard benefits customers struggling to collect payments at some post office branches.

Manx Telecom customers in North Douglas, Onchan, Laxey, Ramsey, Sulby, Peel, St John’s and Kirk Michael were affected.

Further customers in the west and north of Douglas lost services temporarily as a result of a hardware switch on Tuesday night which engineers hoped might fix the problem.

As the Manx Independent went to press yesterday (Wednesday) the cause of the problem had still not been established.

A spokesman said: ’At the present time the root cause of the problem has not yet been identified but we are working with our partners Nokia to understand exactly what has happened and how to restore services as soon as possible.

’The broadband system is complex and the fault is also intermittent in some places so this has made it difficult to pinpoint the exact failure but we have a number of experts from Nokia helping us to assess the situation.’

She added: ’We apologise to all our home and business customers who have been affected by this incident.

’Please be assured we are treating the situation with the highest priority and are doing our best to resume normal service as quickly as we can.’

Given the extraordinary circumstances, Manx Telecom said it would provide affected broadband customers with access to unlimited mobile data.

Customers will be able to request a refund of unusual excessive data charges accrued over the period of the outage.

Manx Telecom also opened up a customer support hub at its headquarters and offered emergency mobile data SIM cards to those in ’critical need’.

Meanwhile, Sure - which said a small proportion of its customers had been affected - announced it was adding an extra 1GB of data a day to its contract customers’ accounts for the duration of the outage.