Virgin Media Business Hit by Broadband Outage After Router Update

Customers of UK cable ISP Virgin Media Business and their 350Mbps capable”Voom Fibre” broadband products appear to be suffering from a high level of service disruption today, as well as a secondary fault that began after a firmware update was pushed to their Hitron CGNv4 routers.

The first situation appears to have started this morning and the second one began at the weekend after the operator pushed a new firmware update down to their end-user Hitrons, which promptly caused connection problems for those with Dynamic IP addresses. At this point we should remind readers that VMB has had plenty of problems with Static IP support on their Hitron kit (here), which is partly related to this incident.

Firmware updates like this tend to be distributed in phases and so it’s likely that the operator was able to stop the update before it hit more of their customers. In a brief update on Twitter VMB said: “Faults reporting a large spike of customers on Dynamic IP’s calling in after the Firmware upgrade. The vast majority are needing a reset on the HITRON to resolve connection issues” (they mean a factory reset, not a soft reset).

As for the main broadband outage..

VMB Service Status Update 16:30

27/02/2018: Known incident affecting Broadband and Data services.

Our customers may be experiencing a total loss of service on Broadband and Data services.

We’re currently experiencing a problem which is affecting our Broadband and Data services.

We’re working hard to resolve this as a priority and apologise for any inconvenience this may be causing.

We’ll be updating this page again with further updates, so please check back again soon.

Meanwhile customers can conduct a factory reset of the Hitron by either firmly pressing the reset button on the back of their device for 30 seconds or going into the web-based admin for the router (192.168.0.1) and Navigating to ‘ADMIN > DEVICE RESET > FACTORY RESET‘.

This issue is not related to the residential side of Virgin Media.

UPDATE 1st March 2018

The original broadband outage appears to have been resolved (oddly VMB simply removed the status page for it rather than updating), although some are still reporting problems. Unfortunately the separate problem with their firmware update for Hitron routers is on-going and it’s becoming clear that the Factory Reset solution doesn’t work for everybody.

https://www.virginmediabusiness.co.uk/help-and-advice/technical-support/Known-outage/