Hundreds of telecom exchanges were affected by interruptions at a BT exchange in London, caused by an electrical fire that followed a flood in the facility. The incident occurred Wednesday morning and BT said in a statement that the effects spread to tens of thousands of customers in the city and possibly other parts of the country in the form of loss of broadband and telephone services.

Internet service provider Gradwell posted parts of a communication it had received from BT Openreach on its Web site. The communication confirmed that the outage at the North Paddington Exchange had affected more than 430 other exchanges. BT told Gradwell i would take up to four days to resolve the outage. As of around 8 p.m. BST, fire crews prevented the company's engineers from entering the facility.

Fire crews arrived to the site at 7:30 a.m., BBC reported.

On the service-status-update page for its customers' Internet connections, BT wrote that it was aware of a "temporary problem," that its engineers were working to resolve it and apologized for inconvenience.