Hrm I had an outage of more than 16 hours last night / this morning on my DSL.
Not that I really care, forced me to do some studying rather than playing World of Warcraft

Outages are a sad fact of life and even with this outage my DSL's uptime is better than 99.5% - I can't really complain about that.
You appear set on it being the entire Ashton / Droylsden area that was affected, you said this before asking if anyone else saw outage, and bashed ntl over failing to report this. The only person from M43 to report anything reports that they saw no outage suggesting that your outage wasn't as large in scope as you thought.
You didn't mention if your modem lost sync or if your connection remained synched but no websites were reachable. I can guarantee you that if you lost sync that fault would not have affected 10k people as no Ashton uBR has 10,000 customers on it and chances are you either had uBR problems or local HFC network problems. You wouldn't share a uBR or any part of the HFC network with 10,000 people.
Although everything after the uBR is resilient, 2 connections from uBR going to 2 different switches taking 2 different fibre routes to 2 different routers in Oldham I guess there may have been issues with both core routers in Oldham, aircon probably
If both routers in Oldham failed this would have affected well over 10,000 people and yes the process shuld report all affected areas. Saying that though chances are it would have been put down as an 'Oldham area' fault as to give each individual postcode affected by a core router failure would be a horrendous task and would take
hours to compile, by which time the fault would be done with.
ntl do still have a service status number if I remember rightly.
This all withstanding I would expect to see a few outages due to the heat making the kit in the ground get a little too warm - this stuff was designed to be stuck on top of poles not in cabinets baking.
My own ISP is just one of a number affected by aircon failures as well.