Construction workers blamed for internet blackout in Melbourne's east

Telstra has blamed clumsy construction workers for a widespread internet outage across parts of Melbourne's east, which has made working and studying from home more difficult.

The third-party construction workers caused "significant" damage to Telstra fibre cables in Box Hill while digging and piling, Telstra said. People in the area began reporting problems with their service on Thursday afternoon.

Internet cables were damaged by constructions workers. Credit: Erin Jonasson

It means suburbs in Melbourne's east, including Box Hill and Mont Albert, are experiencing outages to Foxtel, the National Broadband Network, broadband cable service and ADSL.

Telstra has apologised and hopes to get services back up on Friday.

"We’re working to restore services after a number of our fibre cables were damaged by third-party construction crews working at a site in Box Hill," a Telstra spokesman said.

"The damage to our cables is significant and it’s impacting NBN, Foxtel and broadband cable services and some mobile sites in the eastern suburbs.

"We’ve had crews working through the night and early this morning to restore services – we’ll start to see some services restored today as we repair the damage."

3AW breakfast host Ross Stevenson was forced to work from the station's Spencer Street studios instead of his home for the first time in weeks because of the outage. He was told it could last two days.

A spokeswoman for the NBN said its customers in places including Box Hill and Mont Albert were without internet.

"We apologise to customers and we are working with Telstra to restores services as soon as possible," she said.