Virgin Mobile Customers Suffer Significant UK Network Outage UPDATE
Customers of Virgin Media’s (Virgin Mobile) EE powered mobile network (MVNO) platform are suffering a major outage today, which appears to be preventing many of them from making calls, sending texts or accessing data (mobile broadband) connectivity.
The fault began just before midday and is currently still on-going, although it’s noted that customers still seem able to receive calls and text messages from other people. Suffice to say that Virgin’s Twitter team is rather busy this afternoon and there are a lot of threads on their community forum about the issue (example).
A spokesperson (Kev) on their community forum said, “We’re working quickly to resolve an issue that’s affecting some of our customers making calls, sending text messages and using mobile data. We apologise to our customers for the inconvenience caused.” Sadly no ETA has been given and many customers have now been without a usable service for 6 hours.
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The irony of all this was not lost on one of their subscribers after he received a message to notify him of their forthcoming price rise, while at the same time being unable to call or text out.
@virginmedia i love the fact you cant text me to let me know that i cant send texts but you can send me a text just now to tell me my plan is rising in price on 1st July by 2.4% , thats gr8 customer service. #nocustomerservice
— Damian McFadden (@damo0765) May 14, 2019
UPDATE 15th May 2019
In a statement posted at 9:46pm last night Virgin Mobile said, “We apologise for the disruption and inconvenience some of our Virgin Mobile customers have experienced today. This was due to a technical issue which we’ve now resolved. We will be compensating our customers for the loss of service and will let them know the details shortly.”
As usual for a mobile operator, we aren’t told what caused the issue.
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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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It’s not like they care.
Have a read on various forums, network congestion all around London, 4G is unusable in Central London due to overscription to customers. VM have a lack of recognition about the issue and claim it has been resolved. Try using 4G at 0.2mb/s speeds, out of London, maybe West London, a bit better, 50mbps but still unusable at peak times.
Nevermind that, they had the shenanigans with increasing contracts from £6 without notice and then apparently the £6 plan is still there if you claim you are leaving them.
Then there’s the automated sms services like Google 2-step which send messages late, over 24 hours which simply is unacceptable.
And recently, nationwide outage for phone calls. Complain, they say coverage is ok on ee’s network so no problems for you. I had enough, contract ends in August, I’m leaving back to 3/iD who may have had congestion issues but they are resolved in a timely matter unlike this pathetic company.
gg virgin mobile.
gg MVNO’s…
What’s worse is that the congestion has occured since December 2018, after the introduction of the Purple Sims, which has the carrier ‘Virgin Mobile’ which before was ‘EE’ – now using their new backbone network has caused so many issues.
Rant over, I will move out asap.
I would never go back to Virgin Mobile. Years ago I signed up for an unlimited deal. Shortly after I joined they imposed a fair usage cap of 2GB, then not long after that they added a speed cap of 2Mbps. They are truly the worst MVNO.
I just went through my messages. At first it was unlimited, then it was 5GB, then it was 5GB but if you used 2GB+ they restricted you to 2Mbps, then they decided to cap everybody at 2Mbps. It was an absolute joke.
We apologise for the disruption and inconvenience some of our Virgin Mobile customers have experienced today
Virgin’s new motto should be
Our broadband & mobile is 5 times more likely to suffer outages compared to sky & BT as we are a colossal screw up of a company. Because we care we will continue to ask you to pay for the privilege. Oh and were sorry because saying sorry makes everything better.
I must be one of the few that doesn’t have issues with virgin mobile, i get 100gig per month, doubled then 100gig roll over if i don’t use it and get a nice 70 odd Mbps on my S9 at all times ive needed it. All for £20 per month at the moment.
Used 12 gig so far this month and not noticed any slowdown at all.
Same here. I’m genuinely really happy with their service so far.
I was on Virgin Mobile up until December 2018. Service is severely lacking compared to EE who they piggyback off. Slow speeds especially at less than 1mbps in Central London and no real control over extras such as WiFi calling and cal diversion. Now on Vodafone and can say their service is one of the best so far and extremely rare that I get no signal. Hi
lol, Another price increase in July for Virgin mobile they are really taking the p!ss now with uk customers.
I queried my bill today as i thought due to the dusruption on Tuesday 14th May the 5G extra data would still be running on my total data only to be told that it was given for only 1 DAY!! What cheapskates are Virgin Media. Can you imagine the stress this caused to be compensated by 5G to use in 1 day? Dayight robbers come to mind