Wednesday 19 December 2007

Virgin users hit by broadband crash

Cable operator Virgin Media's broadband and video-on-demand services crashed last night, leaving an unspecified number of its 3.6 million customers temporarily without facilities including internet access.

The problem, which Virgin Media said accidentally occurred during "routine maintenance", primarily affected customers in the north-west, Yorkshire and the Midlands.

Virgin Media's broadband and VOD services went down not long after 9pm last night.
"At 9.20pm last night, customers in a number of regions temporarily lost connectivity to their broadband and video-on-demand services," said Virgin Media.

"This occurred as a result of an error during a routine maintenance process which affected some customers' modems and set-top boxes."

Virgin added that the "majority" of affected customers regained their service "shortly after midnight".

However, as the restoration process was handled in waves, the problem was not completely fixed in all areas until after 10am today.

VOD services were the simplest to restore, while some broadband customers in formerTelewest regions had the longest wait, said a Virgin Media spokeswoman.

"Our engineers are currently working to restore the few remaining connections as quickly as possible," said the company. "We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused. Broadcast television and telephone services were unaffected."

Virgin added that it was not yet possible to state exactly how many customers had been affected.

"As the loss was temporary and not a network outage, it is difficult to establish the exact scale of the affected customers," the company said. "Some customers may have noticed a loss of service as short as a few minutes, many may not have seen any loss of service at all, depending on when they were online."

No comments: