Orange has apologised to customers after its broadband services failed and they were left unable to access the internet.

An outage to the company's broadband occurred on Thursday (September 10th), which Orange has put down to "vandalism" of cables.

The broadband provider claimed the problem was fixed quickly after it was made aware of the issue, however services were down for several hours.

A spokesperson for Orange told the BBC the issue was the due to problems with the "cabling infrastructure supplied to us by a third party provider" near Heathrow.

"Some of our broadband customers may have encountered issues accessing the internet earlier today. We can confirm this matter was fixed shortly after being identified and full service was also resumed," it added.

At the end of August, broadband customers with Virgin Media were left with only intermittent access to emails for the space of four days due to a national outage.