System Error Leaves Virgin Media Broadband User Offline for 19 Weeks
Broadband ISP Virgin Media UK has blamed a “system error” for leaving one of its new customers without a working internet connection for nearly five months, which resulted in repeated failures to complete the installation via missed engineer appointments. But to make matters worse, the provider initially only offered £30+ worth of compensation for the trouble.
The problems began for Totnes (Devon) based mum Cathy Meredith in mid-January 2025, when she lost internet access. Cathy has to care for a disabled adult daughter who suffers from multiple conditions and was initially given a new installation date of 4th February. But despite over 50 attempts being made by Ms Meredith to get the installation completed, the family remained offline until 27th June 2025.
During the long wait, Virgin Media is said to have scheduled incorrect engineers – resulting in missed appointments – and failed to complete the required exterior works in order to connect the service, until 10th June (as above, service activation then followed several days later).
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According to the Totnes Times, Ms Meredith was then offered just over £30 in compensation, which she rightly found “offensive“. This is particularly true when we consider that Virgin Media are part of Ofcom’s Automatic Compensation scheme (full summary), which until April 2025 should have been paying out £29.15 for missed appointments and then £5.83 per day for delays to the start of a new service (this increased from April to £31.19 and £6.24, respectively).
Virgin Media originally tried to argue that the fault was with one of their third-party contractors and thus they only saw fit to offer compensation for the single week it actually took to carry out the final installation (once they sorted out their “system error“). But this neglects the fact that the customer’s contract is with Virgin Media (i.e. responsibility ultimately rests with your retail provider).
The long outage caused Cathy to depend on her limited pay-as-you-go mobile data connection. But the good news is that, after some pressure from the local newspaper, Virgin Media finally agreed to a more suitable level of compensation.
A spokesperson for Virgin Media said:
“We’ve spoken with Ms Meredith directly to apologise for the time it took to install her services. The initial delay was caused by the property requiring additional pre-enablement works which were unfortunately repeatedly rescheduled due to a system error.
In line with the auto-compensation scheme, Ms Meredith has received a credit of £792.48, and an additional £75 as a gesture of goodwill. We are happy to provide this in the form of a cheque if Ms Meredith would prefer, and we’re waiting to speak again at a time that’s convenient for her.”
Unfortunately, this is not the first time that we’ve seen a signatory ISP trying to wriggle out of paying customers the correct level of compensation under Ofcom’s scheme, and it really should not have taken media pressure to rectify the situation. We’d be interested to hear from any other Virgin Media customers who’ve had a struggle to get the provider to pay out the correct level of compensation under Auto Compensation.
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Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Ah… There’s the Virgin we all know.
About true to form then….
About right fir Virgin, Hopefully her area is not a VM monopoly and she can move, they should also give her the option of being let out of the contract, Penalty free, but i bet they won’t
Unfortunately this also happened for me, install was rescheduled 5 times over 3 Months then my whole order was cancelled and was told my house was not eligible for Fibre (despite them doing the prep work and installing their box on my house and running fibre to the local pole).
After 3 weeks I was magically told my house was eligible for fibre again but had to start the whole process again and setup a new order.
They did the same to my disabled mother and father a few years ago. This was long before the alt nets arrived. I had to email the CEO and only then I got somewhere. Move away from them if you can. Find a 5G data plan and use that. VM are poor value and their “tech support” are beyond a joke. They simply do not get it.
Virgin have always had terrible business processes. It is deeply ingrained in their culture. Many years ago my brother worked as a contract installer for them. They would lay him and his team off on Friday afternoon and call them again on Monday morning to come back to work for them, utter madness.
The irony here is that trying to cancel Virgin is almost impossible. 🙂
I’ve been battling with VM since January. Received an email late December advising that the service was available via NextFibre. A few weeks later received a message that there was a delay and would take “a few weeks to sort out”.
For the last 7 months I’ve put my details into the website only to be told now that the service is unavailable, however 30 minutes later I get a text message telling me the service in available and to go online and order, only to face the same page of service unavailable. Rinse and repeat.
Calling customer service is pointless, they’ve all been outsourced Indian call centres. I’ve gone so far as to go into a Virgin/O2 store, have a manager fill out a whole bunch of form that only they have access to on their portal to request information have have someone contact me. That was 4 months ago, and still have not heard anything.
If this is how Virgin treat potential clients and how utterly useless their systems are as one hand clearly has no idea what the other is doing, then I dodged a bullet.
Yet another reason for never using Virgin Media. They should copy Zen Internet’s customer service model. Fortunately, VM decided some years ago that my property was too far away from their new diverted route through to the nieghbouring village to be economic. Even so, it took them another 2 years to connect in that village.
I’m a Virgin media customer living down in Dover, when it comes to the full fibre network, I can’t get it. I can’t even find out when I might be able to get it. The post code is ct162rt not one of the providers give me a date or even a possibility. When unlikely to get it
But other houses around this postcode have got it. I am pretty sure there is unfair trading. Go in Norton with the local council, broken and restricting areas that are allowed it
Here and over. We need help when it comes to the full fiber
I’ve had similarly bad experiences with Virgin Media a couple of years ago. For some reason, packets kept dropping on my connection very frequently and it was hard to reproduce when their techs came over. After 5+ appointments, they just swapped out their kit, which did nothing.
Virgin was the only provider with gigabit speeds in my postcode, so I had to move from them as soon as my contract was up to BT FTTC, which while only offering a fraction of the speeds, has been rock solid.
Ive had 29 virgin engineer visits in the last 18months and they still couldnt fix my internet,i was offerd £150 compensation by Ombudsman and forced to leave,i feel so cheated
I had 8 new routers and 5 new installs and still they couldnt fix the problem,the engineers estimate i was having over 7000 dropouts a day,virgin are by far the worst isp
I stayed with VM for years mostly because the alternative was VDSL. I did try FTTP from Openreach when it was first deployed on my street but it was bloody terrible However got shot of VM and moved to Aqiuss this January and never looked back. Yes it’s still using OpenReach FTTP network but the speed difference between when the network first launched and now is night and day. And, I’ve still not had call to speak to customer service since taking the service out. Which, compared to the near monthly calls to VM is quite something. Night and Day, Night and Day.
I’ve been with Virgin since April and I still don’t have working internet. To add insult to injury they’re saying I still have to pay for a service I’m not getting. Apparently now if I want to leave I have to pay the early contract end fee. Absolutely the worst internet provider I’ve ever used.
We’ve been having issues with virgin for the past month, cutting out for 7+ hours at a time. Me and my partner both work from home and it conveniently cuts out around 2pm during the week but never the weekend. Getting nowhere with VM 3 promised engineers who never turned up, promised a call back with their floor manager never happened. Complaint currently open and getting nowhere with them. Worst internet provider we have ever had.
Have been charged for Netflix 6.99a month for several months even though I am on standard subscription, I was told to contact Netflix as it wasn’t anything to do with Virgin Media , even last month still paid again.