Runnymede Council phone and internet outage restored after service disruption

Runnymede Borough Council (RBC) in Surrey briefly lost its telephone and online services this week, an outage the authority initially blamed on BT and which it said had left as many as 2,000 vulnerable residents without their Community Alarm service. The problem was resolved the same evening.

A council account on Facebook first claimed that "BT have cut off the phone and internet connections", adding that the loss had affected the alarm system "which summons help in an emergency". The incident was first spotted on the afternoon of 2 July 2026.

The wording drew scrutiny, since an intentional disconnection of a local authority by BT would be highly unusual and a general network fault is a far more likely explanation. The council later softened its message on both its Facebook page and website, telling residents: "We are currently experiencing some technical disruption to our telephone and online services. Please try again later today. We apologise for any inconvenience."

Services restored

The disruption did not last long. At 6pm the council posted an update confirming its systems were working again: "We're pleased to report our phones and online systems are back up and running."

No official explanation for the outage was given by either the council or BT. Some observers questioned whether the Community Alarm control room relied on a number allocated to Virgin, and whether an attempt to move that number between networks, for example porting a Virgin range holder number from the old PSTN to a digital voice service, might have played a part. That remained speculation.

Questions over resilience

The episode raised wider questions about how much backup was built into the council's setup. Commenters asked whether a secondary connection, such as a mobile link or Starlink, could have kept critical services such as the Community Alarm running during the outage. One suggested the situation could draw the attention of Ofcom in the months ahead if it proved serious.

RBC has been under financial pressure in recent years. In December 2024 the government lifted a Best Value Notice it had issued over the authority's debt levels, after the council built up around £600m in debt, roughly 71 times its core spending power. The money had funded regeneration projects and the council's own companies, with the aim of using the profits to pay for services it could not otherwise afford.

Ministers said they were reassured by the steps the council had taken, which included working closely with Whitehall to improve how it manages its commercial assets and overall debt, and beginning to sell parts of its property portfolio. Even so, the government remained concerned about the "significant" debt it still held and the risk it carried.

Writing to RBC's chief executive, Suzanne Clarke, deputy director of local government finance said: "Whilst we are not renewing the notice, the department remains concerned about the significant debt held by the council and the risk this carries. We expect the council to continue taking steps to reduce and manage its overall debt."