Up to 20,000 CellularOne customers were cut off yesterday as a lightning strike blew out the company's main control switch.

Chief operating officer Frank Amaral said the incident was the first of its kind in CellularOne's ten year history, and would be "quite an event" for any telecommunications company.

The network went down at 12 noon, cutting all cellular phone service and Internet access to customers across the Island. Service was restored by 6.30 last night.

Although lightning has hit CellularOne's cell sites (towers and antennae) in the past, the odds of such a strike on a telecommunications nerve centre would be "very low", said Mr. Amaral.

"We've had instances in the past during these types of lightning storms but this is the first time we've had lightning affect the main switch," he said.

"We think the lightning strike happened near the building but not directly on it. But it affected the equipment inside and that's what caused the network outage."