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

If you’re with Virgin Media, then there are a range of ways to find out whether any internet problems are really with your internet provider – or just you – both those offered by the company as well as by others – to find out what is going on with your connection.

If the internet stops working, the first thing to do is to check with another device, if you have one to hand. If that isn’t working either, it confirms there’s something wrong with the connection, rather than just that specific computer or phone’s connection.

After that, it can be helpful to restart the router: just turn it off and on again at the power. While it’s an annoying thing to say, it can also solve many internet problems, by resetting the connection and getting things working again.

If that doesn’t work, there probably is something up with Virgin Media rather than your internet. The best way to find out about that is to navigate to the company’s “service status” page.

There, you can log in and test out your connection and your equipment. You can also follow instructions to get help with any equipment that isn’t working, if there’s a failure rather than a temporary issue.

If you don’t want to log in, then you can use its area checker to put in your postcode and see if there are any local problems.

It can also be worth checking Virgin Media’s official Twitter account, which is usually quick to respond to any questions about service problems or any other issues.

Of course, those pages might not always be updated straight away. If you want something quicker, you could try Virgin Media’s Down Detector page, which will let you know if there are any issues ongoing.

That page does work by looking at user reports and social media posts, though, and so might be triggered wrongly and can’t always be relied on. However, if the number looks high and the chart looks red, it does suggest there’s probably a widespread problem.

Virgin Media stopped working for thousands of users around the UK on Tuesday morning, leaving customers without access to internet services.

Virgin Media users complained on social media that their WiFi and broadband were not working, while internet outage monitor DownDetector showed thousands of reports.

“We’re aware of an issue that is affecting broadband services for Virgin Media customers as well as our contact centres,” Virgin Media said in a statement on Tuesday morning.

“Our teams are currently working to identify and fix the problem as quickly as possible and we apologise to those customers affected.”

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 5:25 pm the company apologised again, saying some customers had “seen a repeat of an earlier issue”.

Virgin Media 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.”

Some Virgin Media customers are now threatening to quit for alternative internet providers.

The telecoms provider 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.

This means customers will not receive any compensation because there was less than a day between the reported outages and reports by the company that the problem was fixed.

Downdetector has shared this heat map, illustrating where problems reported by Virgin Media customers were concentrated over the past 24 hours.

London, Birmingham and Cardiff residents have submitted the greatest volume of complaints.

Other major cities, including Glasgow, Nottingham and Manchester, have also witnessed high levels of disruption to broadband.