Thousands of CableVision customers in the western parishes suffered an outage overnight Tuesday after a landscaper cut the company's overhead cable.

The worker was cutting hedges on Harbour Road on the Paget/Warwick border when he damaged the inch-thick fibre-optic line which stopped service to one third of Warwick and all of Southampton and Sandys.

In order to fix the problem CableVision engineers worked through the night and had to cut through the whole line resulting in a total service blackout affecting thousands of western homes. But full service was restored by 7 a.m. yesterday said company boss Jeremy Elmas.

He said: "We are looking to see if there was negligence. Obviously we are not too happy about this situation but it may have been an accident.

"We are going to have an analysis to see if it can be prevented in the future."