Virgin Media UK Suffer Major Outage in West London After Criminal Theft

Cable operator Virgin Media has confirmed that a “major outage“, which left a large area of West London (England) without broadband and TV services for around 24 hours from Sunday night, was caused by an attempted theft at one of its key network hubs.

The situation, which is understood to have resulted in a mix of lost broadband connectivity, slow speeds, web page loading problems and a loss of TV services, typically affected residents in Hayes, Slough Uxbridge, Ruislip, Twickenham, Hounslow and the surrounding areas.

According to Virgin Media, the problems were centred on their network hub in Hayes and the Slough CMTS site. Customers, many of whom also felt angry at the lack of information being released, were further frustrated when the ISPs forum team refused to tell disgruntled customers what had caused the situation (here). Thankfully their press office was a little bit more informative.

A VirginMedia spokesperson told ISPreview.co.uk:

“Following a suspected attempted theft at one of our sites, some of our customers in the Slough area may have experienced disruption to their broadband and TV services. Our engineers worked at the highest priority to get everyone back online and all services were fully restored on Monday night. We apologise for any inconvenience caused during this time.”

It’s understood that Virgin Media are continuing to monitor performance and stability in order to ensure that everything is back to normal, although the issue does now appear to have been resolved.