Virgin is DOWN: Thousands of customers across Britain are left without internet
- Reported outages total in the thousands and started around 8am
- Virgin is investigating the issue and has apologised to affected customers
- It has left people working from home unable to get on to Teams, Slack and email
- Hotspots sprung up this morning in major cities as people tried to log on and work from home
Virgin Media broadband is down across the UK, leaving thousands of people without internet access.
According to outage tracker site downdetector, four out of five reported issues with Virgin are related to cable internet.
The source of the outage remains unknown, but mass loss of connection has been reported in major cities, including London, Birmingham and Manchester.
Virgin Media broadband is down across the UK, leaving thousands of people without internet access
A Virgin Media spokesperson said: ‘We’re aware of a fault affecting broadband services for some of our customers.
‘We are working as quickly as possible to restore services and apologise to those affected.’
Virgin says it is investigating the source of the issue but is unable to give a timeline on when services will be restored.
Virgin Media is one of the most popular broadband providers in the UK.
With thousands of Virgin customers left without access to the internet, it has had a knock-on effect on other services. For example, there has been a spike in reported problems with workplace tools such as Microsoft, Outlook, Teams, Slack, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and LinkedIn. These sites are themselves working fine, it is just the Virgin internet they rely on has crashed
Unlike many other internet service providers, it has its own infrastructure and does not use the Openreach network. As a result, customers on BT, TalkTalk, Sky or other networks are unaffected.
With thousands of Virgin customers left without access to the internet, it has had a knock-on effect on other services.
For example, there has been a spike in reported problems with workplace tools such as Microsoft, Outlook, Teams, Slack, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and LinkedIn.
These sites are themselves working fine, it is just the Virgin internet they rely on has crashed.
Entertainment tools such as Netflix and Xbox Live have also had reported issues.
Today’s technical difficulties come one week after Virgin’s mobile services, but not its broadband, experienced technical difficulties for one hour on March 3.
One day before, on March 2, it suffered another glitch which affected its mobile coverage.
Dr Yousef Abul-Haija, a chemist at the University of Glasgow, tweeted: ‘hey @virginmedia I have an important online meeting to attend and my wifi isn’t working. Help please.’
Others shared their own thoughts on the drop in coverage. Some customers also became annoyed at the difficulty in formally reporting any connectivity issues to Virgin.
Chris Watkinson tweeted: ‘@virgin media how many times do I have to go through this ‘fault checker’ process on your website before I can click ‘no this hasn’t resolved my issue’? What a pointless exercise! Cannot wait until my contract with you is up!’