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AN attempted cable theft is being blamed for the widespread telephone and internet connection problems in Stevenage and Knebworth today.

Areas of the two towns, as well as Welwyn and Hatfield, remain without telephone and broadband services, as engineers attempt to fix the problem.

BT has reported it has fixed its telephone services, but broadband users are still affected.

The company says damaged cables has been the primary cause of the outage.

A BT spokesman said: “We have suffered cuts to underground cabling in an apparent attempted cable theft which is affecting some services in the area at the moment.

“Engineers have been onsite and urgently working in very difficult conditions to assess the damage and to start to work on repairs.

“We are doing all we can to get this work completed to start to restore service as quickly as we possibly can.”

Sky is also reporting an exchange outage in Knebworth, and is still working to resolve the issue.