Second major outage leaves Virgin Media customers without internet

Thousands of Virgin Media customers are without internet access for the second time today after a broadband outage.

Users first reported problems in the early hours this morning, but appeared to be back online by about 4am. The issue returned at around 8am, leaving users across the country unable to get online.

At 11.36am Virgin Media issued an update saying the issue with the broadband had been resolved.

‘We’ve restored broadband services for customers but are closely monitoring the situation as our engineers continue to investigate,’ said a Virgin Media spokesperson. ‘We apologise for any inconvenience caused.’

However, by late afternoon users again began experiencing issues. Many took to Twitter to share their experiences using #VirginMediaoutage.

At around 5.30pm, Virgin Media tweeted: ‘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.’

DownDetector, a website that records broadband issues, is showing large clusters of outages in a number of cities and towns across the country, including London, Cardiff, Birmingham, Manchester and Edinburgh.

The outage comes days after Virgin Media increased the cost of its broadband, TV and home phone packages for millions of customers, with monthly costs increasing by an average of 13.8%.

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