Yesterday Virgin Media broadband customers in the affected location were left without a broadband connection. The outage, which occurred on Tuesday, has now been fixed by the provider.

The cause of the disruption was a group of thieves who, in a display of rank stupidity that could really shake your faith in our schools system, apparently mistook Virgin Media’s fibre optic broadband cables for copper wire.

Perhaps unsurprisingly some of those affected aren’t happy. To the extent that are now calling for compensation to cover the costs of their being offline. And they’ve taken to Twitter to air their grievances.

It’s not difficult to sympathise with them. It’s an incredible inconvenience to be without broadband. But Virgin Media, to its credit, responded quickly to the problem, sending out engineers to repair the damage within hours of the problem arising. And they’ve been vigorously responding to queries and complaints via Twitter and giving regular progress updates.

What's more, it’s hard to see what else they can reasonably do in the circumstances. After all, this wasn’t an outage relating to technical problems for which the network operator could be deemed culpable. It was a random act on the part of members of the public which a provider couldn’t possibly have stopped.