Rats have been blamed for causing a ten-day outage for Openreach customers in Askern, a town within the city of Doncaster, England.

The outage was flagged publicly by former Labour Party leader and Doncaster North MP Ed Miliband this week.

Nearly 100 premises in Askern suffered from an outage after the rats chewed through one of Openreach's cables in the area, reports ISP Review.

"I know many of you in Askern have been without broadband for over ten days now, and I wanted to give you an update on what's happening," said Miliband in a social media post.

"I've been in touch with Openreach, who've explained that the problem started with rodent damage to cables. When their engineers went to fix it, they found a collapsed duct underground, which meant they had to excavate and replace it."

Miliband added that the duct has now been replaced and Openreach will lay the new cable today ahead of services being back up and running this evening (December 2).

Miliband was critical of Openreach over a lack of communication with its impacted customers.

Openreach is currently building out its full fiber network across the UK, with plans to reach 25 million premises with fiber by the end of December 2026. The telco has passed 20 million so far.

It's not the first time rats have caused an Openreach outage. Rodents were blamed for tucking into broadband cables in Hertfordshire back in 2023.

In 2021, mice were behind a Telstra outage in New South Wales, Australia, when the country was overrun with a plague of mice.

Elsewhere in Canada, a beaver brought the Internet down for 900 customers in British Columbia, Canada, when the large rodent chewed through a Telus fiber cable near a creek and used some of the materials for its dam.