Virgin Media UK Fixes Hyphen Conflict on Mobile Account Login

Customers of Virgin Media’s Mobile service who have a hyphen “-” in their email address (domain) have been unable to login to their online account pages for nearly two months, which began after the cable ISP made a change that caused their sign-in page to reject related addresses (email addresses act as usernames).

The hyphen sign is common in many domain names and is supported by the RFC standard. Suffice to say that many people have put a hyphen into their email addresses and until recently this was recognised without a problem by Virgin Mobile’s sign-in form. Unfortunately this appears to have changed at around the start of June 2018 and suddenly customers found that related addresses were no longer being recognised.

Several posts about the bug exist on Virgin’s Community Forum (e.g. here and here) but until recently the operator’s support staff have appeared to be uninterested in resolving it, which should be a fairly easy fix (on the surface it appears to stem from a bit of flawed verification code written in JavaScript).

Instead customers have been told to simply create a new email account (without a hyphen), which caused some to complain that the provider was “too lazy” to fix the issue itself. We have since chased Virgin Media up and a spokesperson has now informed ISPreview that it should finally be fixed sometime today, although this has yet to be confirmed.

UPDATE 10:22am

The bug should now be fixed.