THOUSANDS of people were left angry after being woken up by early hours phone calls mistakenly made by Electricity North West .

The messages to warn ‘vulnerable’ people about adverse weather were due to go out on Wednesday afternoon but were delayed by a computer glitch.

The automated messages were sent as texts to mobile phones, but those forwarded to landline numbers caused people’s house phones to ring.

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The company has since apologised for the calls.

Marian Day, 66, from Laneshawbridge, was among those woken by the calls.

She said: “They rang at 4.37 in the morning. I couldn’t believe it.

“I have children and grandchildren and great grandchildren. One of my great grandchildren has asthma and he keeps being taken into hospital.

“I thought it was something to do with that so I shot up out of bed to pick the phone up, only to find Electricity North West had rang me.

“I wasn’t best pleased.

“As soon as she rabbited on about weather conditions I put the phone down.

“I thought this is ridiculous at that time of the morning.

“We know what the weather’s like because we can see it out of the window.”

Around 250,000 people are registered for the alert service according to Electricity North West, but not all were affected.

The alert warned householders to allow extra time to plan their journeys, and to be prepared for the possibility of power outages.

Jenny Procter, 37, from Blackburn, received calls at 2am and 4.30am, and said she had no idea why she had been signed up to the alerts.

She said: “Obviously you panic because you think it’s a family member that’s ill, you think you’re getting bad news at that time, and you’re trying to get to the phone in the dark.

“I eventually silenced the phone, so if anybody had really been ill they wouldn’t have been able to ring through.

“I’m not vulnerable. We’ve all seen the coverage on the news about the weather, so we didn’t need that message, it’s a bit patronising.”

Tracey Cooke, 43, from Newchurch, also received a call, at 2am.

She said: “Only a few weeks ago my partner was taken into hospital. My first thought was he’s been taken poorly again.

“It was breathing problems, so I thought he was sat in the back of an ambulance texting me because he couldn’t call.

“It woke me up and I eventually got back to bed about 3.30am.

“I had to go down for a brew. Maybe it was a marketing ploy by the electricity company to get us all up to have a brew!”

Pat Lambert, 64, who lives off Casterton Avenue in Burnley unsubscribed from the service after receiving calls at 1.15am, 4.15am and 7.15am.

She said: “You answer it in the middle of the night because you think it might be your family.

“When they started saying it was Electricity North West I put the phone down.

“I don’t sleep well at the best of times so I wasn’t best pleased about being woken up.”

Raynor Pepper, 43, from Worsthorne, said she was also opting out of the alerts after receiving a call at 3.06am.

She said: “I thought somebody had had an accident or was ill somewhere in the family. I wasn’t best pleased.

“I think the idea of it is quite good, but you’d have to be on a different planet not to be aware of the weather.

“It’s overkill on their part, and the system needs a bit of refinement.” A spokesperson for Electricity North West said: “We sincerely apologise for the text messages and calls that customers received during the night.

“We operate a Priority Services Register so that we can offer vulnerable customers extra help during power cuts.

“Due to the bad weather we sent warning messages to everyone on our list yesterday afternoon.

“Unfortunately, some messages were not received until the early hours of the morning, including messages that were sent to landlines, resulting in phone calls.

“We can reassure people that we will not be sending any further messages out until we have resolved this issue, and if anyone would like to opt out of such warnings in future, please email us at enquiries@enwl.co.uk.”