Some 12,000 Eircom customers are currently without phone or broadband service, and the telecoms company says some customers may have to wait up to two weeks before their service is restored.
The number of customers without service is expected to increase as the volume of reported faults rise as a result of severe weather across Ireland.
The company has diverted all available technicians to work on repairing faults and crews will work throughout the weekend in order to restore service as quickly as possible and clean up structural damage, such as broken poles or fallen cables.
Some 700 repair crews have been deployed across the country.
Most customers can expect service to be restored within four working days, Eircom said.
“However, due to exceptionally high backlogs in Cork and Kerry it is likely to be five to six days and in Galway/Mayo a minority of customers could face outages of up to two weeks,” the company said in a statement.
Eircom said flooding, lightning storms and hurricane-force winds are behind the damage.
The worst affected areas include coastal areas of the south-east (Carlow, Kilkenny, Waterford, Wexford), the south and south-west (Cork, Kerry, Limerick, Clare), the west and north-west (Galway, Mayo, Sligo, Roscommon, Donegal).
“The sustained severe weather over the past two weeks has been unprecedented,” Eircom added. “During the past fortnight, Eircom has restored service to more than 17,000 customers. However, we have received 9,000 new fault reports this past week and 22,000 faults in the past 14 days.”
Eircom encourages customers to report faults as soon as possible and at any time, either by logging a fault on the ‘Log a Fault’ section of its website or through its automated customer service line, 1901.
