Virgin Media's UK Broadband ISP Customers Suffer Email Outage ...

Customers of UK ISP Virgin Media’s (VMO2) internet service, specifically those that still use their email platform, appear to be experiencing an outage that seems to have started late on Sunday evening. But the majority of people only began to notice it earlier this morning, and the situation is currently ongoing.

At the time of writing, the operator has merely confirmed that they’re aware of the issue (VirginMedia Forum), although they’ve yet to say when it might be resolved. A spokesperson said: “We’re aware of an issue that is affecting our Virgin Media email service for customers. Our teams are working to resolve the problem as quickly as possible, and we apologise for the inconvenience caused.”

NOTE: Virgin Media Mail operates several email domains, including @virginmedia.com, @ntlworld.com, @blueyonder.co.uk and @virgin.net.

Customers that try to access their email account are reporting that they often receive the “Connection timed out. Please try reloading the page” message, while others have found that Virgin’s email servers are neither able to send nor receive new messages (note: some people have been able to send emails via their SMTP server). The operator’s official fault page did initially indicate a fix time of 2:10pm today, but obviously that was only an estimate and has now passed.

The reality with email is that, even once the underlying problem is finally resolved, then it may take several hours before the operator’s servers are able to catch up with the backlog of messages. As we’ve always said, seemingly since the dawn of time, it’s generally wise to use a separate email service from the one provided by your broadband ISP. Not only does this make it easier to switch providers, but it also means that you’ll hopefully be with a service where email is a dedicated focus (most ISPs these days treat email as an afterthought, assuming they offer it at all).

UPDATE 3:42pm

The most recent update on Virgin’s service status page shows a new estimated fix time of 7.10pm.

UPDATE 5pm

Estimated fix time has been pushed back again, this time to 8pm.

UPDATE 20th June 2023 @ 7:17am

Customers are reporting a mix of experiences this morning. Some users report that they can now send but still not receive emails, while others seem to be experiencing the opposite. Meanwhile, others say they’ve started receiving emails again, but that all of their historic messages have vanished.

Clearly the issue is yet to be properly resolved and Virgin Media’s fault page has put the estimated fix time back to 8:30am this morning. But take that with a pinch of salt.

The provider hasn’t been offering email as a feature to new customers for a while, so it’s clearly a service that’s on the way out. But most of the major ISPs have had problems like this with email in the past and, sadly, big disruptions often take a few days to fully resolve due to the complex nature of such platforms (big databases and lots of time-sensitive mass batch processing requirements etc.).