Virgin Media Outage Affects Tens Of Thousands

Tens of thousands of Virgin Media users reported the service becoming unavailable at peak time early on Monday evening.

Virgin Media said the outage had been “very short”, but users continued to report problems hours after the issue began at 5 p.m. BST, coinciding with the government’s daily coronavirus briefing.

By 5:30 p.m. more than 30,000 users had reported service becoming unavailable to the Downdetector service.

Some users said service had been restored quickly, but others continued to report issues on Downdetector and social media hours later.

Outage

The problems affected both broadband and TV service, with about 80 percent saying their wired connections had been affected and the remainder reporting mobile internet problems.

Birmingham, Nottingham, Glasgow, London, Manchester, Bristol, Southampton, Eastleigh and Liverpool were amongst the cities with the highest number of reported problems.

Virgin Media said the problem was “intermittent”.

“We’re currently investigating an intermittent broadband issue that lasted for a very short period of time earlier this evening,” the company said.

“While services are currently back up and running, our teams are looking into the problem and will work flat out to fix it. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.”

Data surge

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 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. had risen from 27 petabytes on 9 March to 51 Pb on 30 March.

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