The Sun managed to get hold of a transcript of the message, which read:

Hello. You are through to NTL customer services. We don’t give a f*** about you. We are never here. We just will f*** you about, basically, and we are not going to handle any of your complaints. Just f*** off and leave us alone. Get a life.

The message was on a line for call centres in Manchester, Swansea and Lanarkshire.

ntl company sources are attempting to blame the embarassing incident on an outside attack, making out that a “hacker” broke into the ntl system. Let me guess, you type a secret code into your phone and can then magically edit the greeting? Yeah right ntl. An employee with a grudge hasn’t been ruled out though, and we all know there are plenty of them around thanks to ntl’s excellent treatment of their staff.

ntl confirmed that an investigation into the incident began this morning. “The problem affected a faults line in our North Eastern area, which includes Middlesbrough, Nottinghamshire and Leicester,” said the spokeswoman.

“Thankfully it didn’t affect the front end of the system, only those callers who rang to report a fault.

“Obviously we would like to apologise to those customers who heard the rant, but we do not yet know how many people that is.”

Showing that nothing has changed at ntl despite repeated assurances, ntl came second to bottom in a report on handling complaints compiled by the Institute of Customer Service earlier this month.

• The Sun: This is NTL now **** off!