Storm Ophelia on its approach to Ireland. Image: lavizzara/Shutterstock
The extent of outages for Eir customers has jumped by a factor of five as Ireland comes to grips with the devastation left by Storm Ophelia.
After announcing earlier this morning (17 October) that 30,000 homes were without broadband and telephone services following the damage caused by Storm Ophelia, Eir has now admitted that this figure has grown by a factor of five.
This means that 150,000 homes supplied by Eir across the country are now without service, with more than one-third (51,000) based in Cork alone.
Wexford was the next worst hit by the outages (10,000), followed by Limerick and Tipperary (9,000) as well as Galway (6,000) and Kildare (3,000).
2,000 customers are without service in each of the counties of Kilkenny, Kerry, Waterford and Wicklow.
“We expect the numbers of customers without service will continue to fluctuate today,” Eir said in a statement.
“Some services will return as power supply issues are resolved. However, we do expect the number of individual fault reports to rise today and over the coming days.”
A lack of site access and road closures are hampering Eir’s field technicians, with more than 250 reports of exposed cables being reported over a period of 24 hours.
Other networks, including Virgin Media and Vodafone, also said that they were affected by the storm, but did not reveal to what extent.
