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Virgin Media wipes out websites with routing blackhole

'Issues which may cause issues' leave network 'virtually unusable' for days

Virgin Media customers have been struggling to access websites via the telco's network for the past four days, after routing errors crippled the service.

The ISP's punters have griped about the problem on VM's forums and various El Reg readers have been in touch to complain that they can't currently access their beloved tech redtop because of the cockup.

We've asked Virgin Media to explain what had gone wrong, but at time of writing it hadn't returned comment to us. The Register will update this story if we do hear more.

Over on VM's forum the company has coughed to "routing issues which may cause issues when accessing certain websites".

According to the official message, dated Friday 25 May, the telco said:

This is currently being investigated by the relevant departments. In most cases this can be resolved by using the Virgin Media proxy.

Virgin Media went on to offer the temporary fix to its users while it works out what's gone wrong.

One Reg reader told us: "Virgin Media's cable broadband has been virtually unusable since Thursday afternoon. Their tech support guys haven't got a clue and just keep saying 'reboot your modem' over and over again. One post from Technical and that's all the communication they've given," he said, before concluding: "The service is a shambles."

Virgin Media's Steve Brett later that day said on the forum that he did "not have a current ETA for this to be fixed".

He added that the fault was logged as a "Major Service Outage" and said that "some very senior heads at Virgin Media" were being kept up-to-date with what had gone wrong and what progress was being made.

Meanwhile, some VM customers suggested that the cause of the routing error related to the company's content filtering and blocking servers. One punter made the unsubstantiated claim that "Virgin Media is preparing a nasty surprise in the near future for their users. So don’t be surprised if access to P2P services and torrent sites [is] banned on VM shortly." ®

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