Virgin Media Broadband Down, Thousands Impacted

Reports are emerging on Thursday morning that Virgin Media is suffering a major outage in parts of London, leaving thousands of people working from home disconnected.

According to Downdetector, users first began complaining of outages shortly after 8am Thursday morning, mostly in parts of London.

However reports of outages Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow and other areas are also being recorded on the website.

Virgin Media outage

And according to some media reports, even Virgin Media’s service status went down for an hour this morning, leaving disconnected people unable to check the status of the connection in their area.

“We’re aware that some customers are experiencing an issue with their broadband,” a Virgin Media spokesman was quoted by the Daily Mail as saying. “We are working as quickly as possible to restore service and apologise to those affected.”

Earlier this morning the operator had said some customers had experienced a ‘brief issue’ with their TV service.

Users took to Twitter to complain.

“Broadband not working in London for the past hour. People need to work from home, unacceptable. Sort your house out,” Paulius B tweeted.

“Down in Solihull too, working from home is fun been tethered to my phone on teams calls all day!!! It’s a nightmare!” tweeted Jayne.

In late April, tens of thousands of Virgin Media users were impacted after its service became unavailable.

Virgin Media at the time said that the outage had been “very short”, but users continued to report problems hours after the issue began.

Thousands of Virgin Media users had also been left without internet or telephone access early in March due to a separate outage that affected parts of England.

Working from home

The UK has seen a huge surge in internet usage since its coronavirus lockdown began, as individuals have been forced to rely on data connections for work, education, information and leisure.

Openreach, the BT Group division that maintains BT’s telephone and wired internet infrastructure, said the data used on its networks between 9am and 5pm on 9 March had risen from 27 petabytes to 51 Pb on 30 March.