UPDATE3 Ntlworld Email and YouTube Buffering Woes for Virgin Media

Customers of Virgin Media appear to have had another mixed weekend after some were hit with yet more connection problems on their ntlworld.com email addresses, while others were forced to suffer an unexpected spate of “buffering” issues when attempting to watch video streams on the popular YouTube (Google) website.

The latest issue with ntlworld.com emails, which began on Thursday last week, follow shortly after a separate incident at the end of August that disrupted the service for related users (here), although this time around Virgin Media reports that the problems appears to only affect users of third-party email clients (e.g. Outlook, Thunderbird etc.) that connect via the servers pop3.ntlworld.com (incoming) and smtp.ntlworld.com (outgoing).

Users of VM’s webmail appear unaffected. Customers who have this fault may be unable to send new messages to their contacts and as a temporary workaround VM has suggested they change servers to the general Virgin Media equivalents (pop3.virginmedia.com / smtp.virginmedia.com / imap.virginmedia.com). An update posted on Friday (here) suggested that this “intermittent” fault might now be fixed, although there are still sporadic reports of problems on their community forum.

Meanwhile some customers also appear to have been suffering from yet more buffering woes with YouTube, which also started around the middle of last week. In an effort to help identify and resolve the problem Virgin Media have once again begun asking customers to give feedback (here). It’s noted that users who avoid Virgin’s network by using a Proxy Server or VPN service appear unaffected, although those who pass through VM directly can suffer problems.

In fairness all sorts of different peering, DNS and or routing problems can affect services like YouTube, which without feedback from end-users can be tedious for ISPs to pin down. So it’s good that VM are engaging customers directly as this is the correct way to investigate such problems, but meanwhile the sporadic issue continues. It should be said that all ISPs can, from time to time, suffer similar faults. On the other hand VM does have somewhat of a history with YouTube buffering.

UPDATE 2:19pm

A spokesperson for Virgin Media has just informed us that the email issue is now resolved and we’re expecting a statement on the YouTube problems shortly.

UPDATE 3:52pm

Now the YouTube update, albeit not saying anything new.

Joe Thomas of Virgin Media told ISPreview.co.uk:

“We are aware of intermittent, local, issues with YouTube and have been working directly with affected customers via our forums and our partners at Google to investigate and resolve issues as soon as possible.”

UPDATE 10th September 2014

Despite the earlier statement it looks like Virgin’s email woes are on-going and an update posted yesterday states that “there is a continuing intermittent problem with ntlworld.com email at the moment“.