Virgin Media says internet working as normal amid reports of outages

Reports of outage come day after major Sky broadband outage and amid questions over future of internet companies

Tuesday 19 November 2019 12:27 GMT

Virgin media down: internet not working as customers hit by broadband outage

Your support helps us to tell the story

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.

At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.

The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.

Your support makes all the difference.

Virgin Media says its internet service is working as normal, despite reports of an outage.

Numerous articles and consumer website uSwitch said that Virgin's broadband was being hit by issues and users were unable to get online.

But the company says there is no major outage and that most people should still be able to connect as usual.

“Our broadband services are running as normal – there is no national broadband outage affecting our network," a Virgin Media spokesperson said.

Confusion around the outage was increased after Virgin Media customers were directed to its service status page.

Read More: Virgin Media broadband offers

But when that site was visited by The Independent, it displayed a message indicating that part of the site "isn't available at the moment", because of "essential work".

The reports of an outage came just a day after Sky broadband was hit by similar problems, which meant that users were also not able to get online. That has since been fixed, after engineers traced the problem to a broken network card.

It also comes amid questions over the future of internet companies. Labour has said that it will bring parts of the internet infrastructure into public ownership and offer free internet if it wins the election – a commitment that leader Jeremy Corbyn referenced in the wake of the Sky outage.

A new scheme means that a number of internet companies – including Virgin Media and Sky, as well as TalkTalk, BT and Zen Internet – will offer customers refunds if service is offline for long enough.

Soon after that commitment was made, Virgin Media was revealed to be the worst company for internet outages in research by Which?.