Virgin Media down – latest: Broadband customers threaten to quit in anger at outages
Tens of thousands of Virgin Media customers reported issues with internet service provider on Tuesday
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Virgin Media customers are threatening to quit for alternative internet providers after the telecoms provider apologised for outages which plunged thousands offline on Tuesday morning.
Customers complained not only about the break in their internet connections but about frustration with the customer service they had received, too.
However, the issue did not last for long enough for customers to be issued with automatic compensation.
Virgin Media is signed up to the Ofcom automatic compensation scheme in which households are entitled to £9.33 for each day their service is disrupted. However, this only kicks in after customers have experienced two days of disruption.
The telecoms provider said at around 11.30am on Tuesday that it had fixed the problems which first started at around 2am, according to data from Downdetector, a site which tracks outages.
However, at 5:25pm the company apologised again, saying some customers had “seen a repeat of an earlier issue”.
Read More: Best Broadband Providers in the UK
How to know if the internet has stopped working – or if it’s just you
Virgin Media’s website appears to be struggling again too.
The homepage and press enquiries pages initially failed to load when The Independent attempted to access them, before eventually loading after a lengthy delay upon a further attempt.
Map shows Virgin Media outage hotspots
Here is Downdetector’s map of Virgin Media outages reported over the past 24 hours.
It shows large hotspots in London, Birmingham, Cardiff and Edinburgh, with outages reported across much of the country.
Reported outages approach 55,000
The fresh outage appears to be affecting nearly double the number of customers hit earlier today prior to the Virgin Media’s apology.
The Downdetector website is highlighting nearly 55,000 reports of outages as of 5:13pm – compared to the peak of 28,565 seen just before 8am.
Virgin Media laments ‘repeat of an earlier issue'
Virgin Media has issued a statement on the new outages.
The company tweeted: “Unfortunately we have seen a repeat of an earlier issue which is causing intermittent broadband connectivity problems for some Virgin Media customers.
“We apologise again to those impacted, our teams are continuing to work flat out to find the root cause of the problem and fix it.”
The Independent has approached the company for further information.
Internet ‘watchdog’ shows ‘second nation-scale outage’ for Virgin Media customers
NetBlocks, a company describing itself as “the Internet’s Observatory”, has this graph showing the “second nation-scale outage” suffered by Virgin Media customers today.
How to know if the internet has stopped working – or if it’s just you
While it’s clear that thousands of Virgin Media customers are experiencing outages this evening, our technology editor Andrew Griffin has previously written this explainer on how to tell when your internet provider has actually gone down:
Is Virgin Media down? How to check for outages in the UK
The last couple of years have shown just how much we rely on the internet: to connect us to friends when we can’t see them, to work when it’s not safe or convenient to be in the office, to watch sport when we can’t go out, to keep up with goings-on when we can’t be there.
The Downdetector website has been picking up a fluctuating number of reported outages since Virgin Media went down again at 4pm.
ICYMI: Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit files for bankruptcy after axing 85% of workforce
Virgin Orbit has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after failing to secure the funding needed to recover from a January rocket failure.
It comes just days after the California-based satellite launch company said it was laying off 85 per cent of its 750 staff and ceasing operations for the foreseeable future.
My colleague Thomas Kingsley has the full report:
Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit files for bankruptcy
The company’s January launch failed citing an ‘anomaly’
Reported Virgin Media outages fall significantly from peak of more than 55,000
The problem appears to be tapering off, with the number of outages reported falling significantly again, according to the Downdetector website.
Virgin Media customers face 13.8% rise in bills
Today’s outages come as Virgin Media customers face their bills rising by an average of 13.8 per cent.
They are by no means alone. According to the MoneySavingExpert website, BT, EE, Plusnet, Shell, TalkTalk and Three have all announced April price hikes of up to 14.4 per cent for mobile and broadband customers.
Virgin also plans to introduce annual inflation-linked price rises from next April, which will be nearly 4 per cent above RPI inflation.
The company has some 5.8 million home broadband users in the UK, according to its latest figures.
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