Virgin Media broadband goes titsup for 3 hours
Routing gear fingered for nationwide outage
Virgin Media was hit by a major broadband service blackout early last night that affected an unspecified number of the telco's five million customers.
The company confirmed that the downtime started on Tuesday evening.
"If you experienced a loss of internet connection between 5pm and 8pm on Tues 17th January, we experienced a national outage during this time, which is now resolved," Virgin Media said on its service status page.
It added: "If you have still not been able to reconnect – please try powering down your router for five minutes and then turn back on and this should re-establish your connection. Virgin Media apologise for any inconvenience caused."
El Reg was inundated with emails from unhappy VM customers affected by the outage.
One punter told us yesterday evening that "VM have all but dropped off the web and all Linx peering nodes show down. Users on the forum complaining and the error number is engaged."
Virgin Media's forum manager Mark Wilkin told the firm's broadband customers that the outage was "related to a routing hardware issue". ®
COMMENTS
Speed AND Reliability
Just for balance, I have less outages and trouble from my Virginmedia line than I do with my Mum's ADSL line. I've had one VM outage in the last three years, and that was at 23:00, so I took it as a hint to go to bed. (just a customer, no connection to any telecoms vendor)
Huh...?
I suggest you contact their technical support department because my colleagues, friends and family who are also VM customers don't experience many (if any) problems at all with our connections, and that's across numerous locations spread throughout the country.
If we were talking about their customer services or their billing departments, however, then I'd be agreeing with you. Those areas of VM do appear to be run by a bunch of incompetent idiots who are, undoubtedly, the first generation within their families to actually walk upright. But, I find the techie side of the company to be exceptionally well run, and they put BT and the ADSL companies I've used to shame.
Before I get downvoted as being some sort of VM shill, I'll just point out that I have no connection with them at all apart from being a broadband customer (although I ditched them for telly and phone after they messed me around after moving house).
Seconded
I was having trouble for a couple of hours beforehand. Couldn't even ftp a 16k file properly.
This morning's been fine though.
Rather than doubling my speed I'd rather they sorted out the quality of their service - I don't need 60Mbps, I need reliability.
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