Flooding in a London telephone exchange which affected thousands of home and business broadband customers also had a serious knock-on effect with websites around the country.
One such victim was P&O Ferries, one of the leading passenger ship operators across the English Channel and on other routes around the UK, which saw its website wiped out until around midday today (Fri 1) - a full 24 hours after the incident first took place.
Telecomms giant BT, which runs the exchange, says "tens of thousands" of customers in London may be "experiencing loss of broadband and/or telephony service" - but does not say how many digital business services such as websites are affected.
P&O Ferries has not indicated for how long its web service was out of action - but any online travel service which gets hit just a few days before the Easter holiday period will be frantically hoping customers use the alternative booking methods indicated on the holding page it ran during the outage.
The flood at the exchange in London is believed to have started early in the morning of March 31. Although fire crews attended the damage and aftermath of the incident sent a ripple of problems around the web and broadband systems as various services became overloaded and businesses panicked.
BT says it is working on getting the remaining affected customers reconnected as soon as possible.