At least nine postcodes of East London’s 21 postcodes have been affected, with locals taking to Twitter to denounce the outage.
Thames Water addressed the issue on Twitter, explaining “our specialist engineers are on site and will be working as hard as possible to restore your water supply.”
Later in the evening, the company posted an update, claiming that “due to the size and scale of the burst, we do expect supplies to be interrupted for the next 24 hours”.
“We’re understandably receiving a lot of contact.
“We may not be able to reply to every customer, however, will continue to update our website every hour.
“Our phone lines also remain very busy so please only ring us if you need emergency support.”
Concerned customers replied to Thames Water’s tweets demanding a solution.
One Twitter user wrote: “I tried to get emergency help for my dad who has terminal cancer to be told you can’t help with bottled water so we just have to wait for the supply to return.”
Another frustrated user added: “How do the tankers work? Will we get some supply?
“We’re in a pandemic and my partner hasn’t been able to wash his hands since returning from a secondary school teaching science.
“Luckily I’d flagged we had no water at 4.15 today and he picked up some to flush the toilet.
“Unfortunately I couldn’t reach your call centre at that time. I did message on Facebook and Twitter.
“Received a response about 2 hours later. It was clearly written by an untrained jobsworth and made a bad situation worse.”
According to the company, vulnerable customers and hospitals are being prioritised and bottled water stations will be set up for the morning.
It added: “We know this has happened at a very difficult time and sincerely apologise.
“Our teams will continue to work through the night.”
