Southern Water outage: Which areas are affected and when will supplies be fixed?

Click on our interactive map to find which postcode areas of Hampshire are affected.

Thousands of people are being warned that water supplies may not be restored in time for Christmas after Southern Water suffered a major outage.

The supplier which has recently experienced problems on the network in Kent, has apologised to customers, and says it is working as quickly as possible to fix the problem.

A combination of factors are being blamed.

Households in and around Southampton are worst affected - as well as homes in Eastleigh, Hedge End and south Winchester all affected over the last two days.

Twelve SO postcode areas are currently affected.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Southern Water said: "The recent heavy rain has caused the amount of sediment in the water we take from rivers to be higher than normal which means our water treatment works are having to work harder to treat the water before it’s supplied to customers.

"This combined with the increased number of leaks we’ve experienced since the recent ‘freeze/thaw’ event has meant demand for water is outstripping the ability to keep taps running.

"We’re working as hard as we can to solve this issue, tackling leaks and stabilising supply, but we had to make really difficult decisions to reduce demand on the network – in order to protect critical Hampshire infrastructure like hospitals."