ALL telephone and internet services at one of Scotland's top universities were completely knocked out for a second day by a mystery fault that caused chaos for students and staff.

Stirling university's 11,500 students and 1900 staff were unable to access any online course work, submit essays or dissertations, or make any phone calls. The blackout also affected the university's external campuses in Stornoway and Inverness.

Services were not restored until after 2pm - nearly 28 hours after the crisis began.

A spokeswoman for the university said that the outage was due to a damaged underground fibre-optic cable.