Thousands of South Londoners have been knocked offline due to a blunder by a construction worker slicing through a Virgin cable.

On Tuesday afternoon, a major segment of Virgin Media's fibre cabling was cut by a pile driver on a construction site in Brixton. The cabling has yet to be repaired.

Approximately 4,300 customers and businesses may be affected – including some customers of Sky, for whom the biz provides backhaul services.

A Virgin spokesman said: "Our engineers have been working overnight to assess the damage and even though we won’t be able to make a full repair until the pile is removed, we are working on a temporary fix to restore services to local customers.”

Sky reported this morning that engineers are currently removing debris so cable restoration work can continue.

Virgin said the construction process is likely to be complex as it will need to replace several hundred metres of fibre cabling.

Wandsworth Council confirmed to The Register this morning that it is still without internet access.

Virgin said it is working to put in place "temporary and permanent" fixes to the problem. Any customers who have contacted us with a loss of service will be eligible for a refund, as set out in their contracts - said Virgin.

It is understood that the construction company was fully aware of the location of all the networks running through and around their site in advance of the build.

Needless to say folk pulled out their phones to moan on Twitter:

@SkyHelpTeam outage in south London over 12 hours. sort it out. — justin bramwell (@justpan) June 15, 2016

Huge @virginmedia outage in south London since mid afternoon. only response is 'engineer on the way' and complete guess fix time of noon tmw — Jon Mark Deane (@EnemyRadar) June 14, 2016

.@virginmedia Getting dangerously close to 24hrs with no service. Also dangerously close to me contacting Ofcom about lack of info/updates. — James Lowey (@JamesLowey) June 15, 2016

®

* Total Inability To Support Usual Performance