[Jonbo298]

BT is looking to recoup more than £25,000 from a Cambridgeshire man after he severed a fibre optic cable while putting up a new fence in his garden.

David Brown, 40, told The Sun he was "shocked" when he received the bill for £25,780 ($45,670) at the end of last month. He has just 21 days to cough up.

The cable was cut in April last year and as a result, BT was forced to replace 2km of cable. A spokesman said the company telco is "anxious to have a chat with him to work out the best way to resolve this matter".

Separately, BT said a "temporary technical problem" was to blame after its website, BT.com, went belly-up at the weekend. The site went offline at 8.30am (BST) on Saturday morning before returning again early afternoon. It also threw a wobbly on Sunday. A spokesman blamed the outage on a processing problem with the database server.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/05/10/bt_bill_cable/

Whoopsie!