Long disconnections on two Sunday nights - related to Sussex weather?

[#1]

Last Sunday night (2nd-3rd November) my FTTC connection was down for about 8 hours from just after midnight. It was definitely a network issue. The light on my Openreach modem was trying and failing to connect (DSL light flashing, then off, then flashing, then off...). I didn't report this because we were having very heavy rain overnight and both beforehand and afterwards the line was perfect.
The same thing happened last night. Again it's overnight Sunday to Monday (9th-10th November), though this could just be coincidence. The line went down at 23:38 and didn't come back up again - according to my router log - until 08:16 this morning. Once more we had heavy weather in the Brighton area overnight: rain, hail, thunder & lightning.
I'm thinking that maybe something on the network has been knocked out each time by either water or lightning, and then BT has fixed it in the morning. If that's the case I'd expect other people to have the same problem. Has anyone else experienced this, either locally at the times mentioned above or in other places at other times?
If not, assuming all's OK again for a while, is it worth reporting as a fault?

[#2]

When the FTTC is off is the phone still OK with no background noise?

[#3]

As Jelv suggests, check the phoneline and make sure there is no noise, crackling, hissing etc. If the problem occurs again then go through the faults checker at https://faults.plus.net and follow the steps there.

[#4]

Yes, phone line was OK - no crackling (at least not at 7.45am when I checked). The internet connection has been up continuously since it came back at 08:16 this morning.
I have had problems with the line this year, but this is different. The problem before was that the DSL line would go down briefly (and at times often), then reconnect within a minute. These 8-hour outages are not the same as that. Apart from these two long breaks my line's been OK since the last time an Openreach engineer came round at the end of September.

[#5]

I'd still suggest going through the faults checker if you continue to experience problems. That way we can help resolve the problem and stop the outage periods hopefully.

[#6]

OK - I'll go through the procedure if it happens again.