VIRGIN Media customers in Papworth, St Neots and Huntingdon were buzzing with anger when their internet and TV service was cut for more than three days – because of bees.

Customers in St Ives also reported issues.

What should have been a straightforward job for engineers, replacing network cards in a broadband hub in St Ives Road, Papworth Everard, was complicated by the presence of a large bees nest in the building.

Dozens of angry customers posted messages online, complaining about the lack of service – one claiming: “This is the worst service I’ve experienced in 13 years as a customer.”

Internet connections were lost on Friday evening (July 20) – and not restored until Tuesday afternoon.

A spokesman for Virgin Media said: “It is a quite unusual one, I’ll give you that! There have been problems and we had some network cards that needed replacing. We were first informed of problems on Friday and sent engineers out. However, they discovered a bees’ nest that was quite entrenched in all the equipment. We needed to have the premises fumigated. After it has been fumigated you can’t go back for 48 hours.

“We have had the period now and engineers were on site yesterday [Monday] and this morning. The majority of our customers should now be back up and running although some people might experience a delay. Obviously we would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused to our customers but the situation was out of hands this time.”