Virgin Media down – latest: Broadband customers threaten to quit in anger at outages

The widespread Virgin Media outages today have impacted a range of local services and businesses across the country.

Among those affected were a number of councils, South East Water, and Leicester City Football Club.

There appear to still be hundreds of people affected by outages, according to the Downdetector website.

In this report on the Virgin Media blackouts earlier today, my colleague Anthony Cuthbertson reported:

Affected customers can check their service status on Virgin Media’s Help page.

Some users reported that they were able to reconnect to the internet by rebooting their router or modem, while others claimed it was possible to circumvent the issue by using a virtual private network (VPN).

Here is the latest map from Downdetector showing the hotspots for Virgin Media outages over the past 24 hours.

Edinburgh, London, Cardiff, Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds all appear to have been particularly affected.

Virgin Media has told The Independent that its services are now “stable”.

A spokesperson said: “Services are currently stable (they have been for a few hours now) and customers can use their broadband as normal. We’re continuing to investigate the issue.”

Here is Virgin Media’s most recent statement, in which it said: “Unfortunately we have seen a repeat of an earlier issue which is causing intermittent broadband connectivity problems for some Virgin Media customers.”

Households already struggling with the cost of living crisis this winter could now see their broadband and mobile phone bills rise by as much as 14 per cent from April.

BT, EE, Plusnet and Vodafone broadband deals all reportedly permit price rises in line with the CPI rate of inflation plus 3.9 per cent, while TalkTalk’s stated increase is CPI plus 3.7 per cent.

Sky Broadband and Virgin Media contracts allow similar increases but do not specify a pricing formula in the same way as their rivals.

My colleague Joe Sommerlad has more details:

The biggest broadband firms are providing a service that is “mediocre at best” as consumers brace themselves for inflation-busting price increases, reports Josie Clarke.

TalkTalk has been rated the worst major broadband provider, losing out to smaller firms such as Zen, in an annual satisfaction survey of almost 4,000 customers by Which?

The watchdog found that most of the biggest firms offer little more than unreliable connections, “appalling” customer service and “barely there” technical support despite announcing monthly bill increases of at least 14% from next month.

Virgin Media came 10th in the ranking with 54 per cent, scoring poorly for customer service and technical support. Virgin’s monthly costs will go up by an average of 13.8 per cent in April.

Ofcom has opened an industry-wide enforcement programme over the delayed One Touch Switch broadband switching process.

One Touch Switch – designed by the telecoms watchdog to make it easier for households to change to a cheaper or faster broadband service – has been missed just as millions are facing huge increases to their monthly internet bills.

The new process would also allow seamless switching between physically separate networks, such as from Openreach to Virgin Media, Hyperoptic or CityFibre, allowing consumers to take advantage of more competitive deals.

Once in place, customers would only need to contact a new broadband provider to switch, and would no longer need to speak to their current provider.

Virgin Media has apologised for the second time in a day over broadband outages affecting customers.

Customers of the telecoms provider initially suffered outages at 2am, which Virgin later said had been resolved as of 11.30am yesterday morning.

However, Downdetector – a site which tracks outages – reported a large spike in problems at around 4pm, causing Virgin to apologise again.

The company said on Twitter: “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 Virgin media outage that left thousands of customers without any internet yesterday came after the company informed people about hike in tariffs.

Virgin media contacted customers earlier to advise them of price increases – averaging at a 13.8 per cent higher bill.

This comes as several broadband and mobile companies, including BT, EE, Plusnet, and Vodafone hiked their prices in April.

Virgin media customers who were left in a lurch after yesterday’s internet issues took at their frustrations on the company with memes on Twitter.

One user called the company “pathetic to the point of it being unbelievable” while another spotted a Virgin media balloon and hoped “that’s the engineer on his way to work”.

Users also pointed the company’s website was down, with one user posting a screenshot of the page with only the “Help” page.

“I think they’re trying to send us a message,” a user wrote.