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Virgin Media goes TITSUP, RUINS Tuesday evening

Wired and wireless broadband down for hours

Update UK internet service provider Virgin Media suffered a Total Inability To Support Usual Performance (TITSUP) event on Tuesday evening, leaving plenty of subscribers without broadband.

The outage appears to have impacted customers across the United Kingdom and to have left the afflicted without terrestrial or wireless broadband services, for several hours.

Virgin Media's help desks melted down, leaving its Twitter feed to pick up the slack.

The Reg's trawl of that resource suggests the outage hit around about dinner time and persisted until around 11:00 PM. The ISP's staff haven't mentioned why the outage occurred and did not offer an ETA for service to be restored.

Exchanges like those depicted below are therefore to be found in large numbers on Twitter.

The company's made no statement The Reg can find on its various blogs and social outlets, but has apparently told customers the problem has been resolved.

At a(n educated) guess, the problem sounds like either a very significant failure in core network infrastructure, or an authentication SNAFU.

Whatever the cause, plenty of punters are cursing Virgin Media and suggesting the philosophies of titular totem Beardy Branson may not include things going titsup and providing only Tweets as explanation. ®

Update A reader has kindly made us aware that Janet, the organisation that operates networks for the UK's education and research communities, also experienced an outage last evening. The trouble ticket for the outage says "We have been advised by our circuit supplier of a fibre break on their back bone circuit within the Evesham area. The fibre break has caused major routing issues within their core network. An update to the trouble ticket says "We have been advised by our circuit supplier that the reason for outage was caused by failure of a routing engine in Brentford" and says the "Problem fixer" was Virgin Media.

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