Virgin Media confirms internet outages with users across UK ...

4 Apr 2023

The Guardian

Virgin Media confirms internet outages with users across UK

Company’s own website down as well as internet inaccessible for many. Follow all our live coverage of business, economics and financial markets

Virgin Media’s main website appears to be serving a mobile version, and we were unable to access its local service checker tool.

The company’s back-up status site says: “There are no major network outages we’re currently aware of.”

As of 8:30am BST, the Virgin Media website is back up, although in greatly reduced form, while some users are reporting being able to reconnect to the internet following a reboot of their router or modem.

Others still have reported that the internet outage could be circumvented by connecting through a virtual private network (VPN), giving a hint of where the wider problems lie, and suggesting that Virgin Media’s outage, like that at Facebook in 2021, may have been the result of a flaw in the deep-level routing systems that allow internet services to connect to each other.

You can read more on what can cause these problems here:

Facebook outage: what went wrong and why did it take so long to fix after social platform went down?

Virgin Media has confirmed that there is an “issue that is affecting broadband services”.

Contact centres are also affected, it said in a statement on Twitter. It has not so far given any indication of the scale of the problem.

It said:

Our teams are currently working to identify and fix the problem as quickly as possible and we apologise to those customers affected.

We’re aware of an issue that is affecting broadband services for Virgin Media customers as well as our contact centres. Our teams are currently working to identify and fix the problem as quickly as possible and we apologise to those customers affected.

— Virgin Media (@virginmedia) April 4, 2023\n","url":"https://twitter.com/virginmedia/status/1643151634006941697","id":"1643151634006941697","hasMedia":false,"role":"inline","isThirdPartyTracking":false,"source":"Twitter","elementId":"0fbf5619-15e7-4a2b-8ffa-c77889033796"}}">

We’re aware of an issue that is affecting broadband services for Virgin Media customers as well as our contact centres. Our teams are currently working to identify and fix the problem as quickly as possible and we apologise to those customers affected.
— Virgin Media (@virginmedia) April 4, 2023

Here is the map of reports of Virgin Media outages by users (again via DownDetector).

As you can see, reports are fairly widespread in the largest cities, where most of the customers for its fibre optic broadband are concentrated.

Virgin Media users started reporting problems in their thousands after 1am on Tuesday morning, according to DownDetector, a web statistics provider.

DownDetector’s data show when reports of outages rise above a normal baseline. By 1:53am the number of outage reports had risen to more than 15,000. After a lull in the middle of the night, there appear to be thousands more people reporting outages in the morning rush to log on.

User reports indicate Virgin Media is having problems since 1:41 AM BST. https://t.co/YHseg8sHrH RT if you're also having problems #VirginMediadown

— DowndetectorUK (@DowndetectorUK) April 4, 2023","url":"https://twitter.com/DowndetectorUK/status/1643051185132253185","id":"1643051185132253185","hasMedia":false,"role":"inline","isThirdPartyTracking":false,"source":"Twitter","elementId":"d18738d5-b82c-4468-a663-6b9320f90d65"}}">

User reports indicate Virgin Media is having problems since 1:41 AM BST. https://t.co/YHseg8sHrH RT if you're also having problems #VirginMediadown
— DowndetectorUK (@DowndetectorUK) April 4, 2023

Good morning, and welcome to our live coverage of business, economics and financial markets.

Virgin Media users across the UK are reporting problems with internet access.

The DownDetector website showed thousands of reports of outages starting just after 1am on Tuesday morning, with a surge of reports from about 6:30am as users tried to log on in the morning.

Users of Twitter posted that they were unable to access the internet via their Virgin connections.

Anyone else’s Wi-Fi down in the uk right now? #virginmedia

— Ben Coutts (@ben_coutts) April 4, 2023\n","url":"https://twitter.com/ben_coutts/status/1643106910382555144?s=20","id":"1643106910382555144","hasMedia":false,"role":"inline","isThirdPartyTracking":false,"source":"Twitter","elementId":"838d443b-c150-43cb-896d-61a7e6fcea59"}}">