Cable ISP Virgin Media UK Blocks Popular Picture Website Imgur UPDATE3

A number of customers from cable broadband provider Virgin Media are reporting that the ISP has blocked the whole of the popular picture sharing website Imgur.com through its Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) linked proxy filter, which normally only targets criminal pages that depict indecent images of children.

The most likely explanation for this is that somebody has uploaded child abuse content to Imgur.com’s otherwise legal website and in response Virgin’s IWF filter has been rather overzealously applied. So instead of only removing access to a specific page or content – the usual approach – it’s actually ended up blocking the entire domain.

As a result of that the vast majority of people who tried visiting the website during the very early hours of this morning, probably just to look at funny cat or dog pictures (par for the course these days), will have instead found themselves faced with warnings about how they may be “committing a criminal offence” and that the consequences “are likely to be serious.” Darn cats and their humorous shenanigans.

A number of related complaints can be found via Twitter and Virgin’s Community Forum. The block appeared to be removed for a short period earlier this morning but it returned again later and we’re not sure what the status is right this moment (those we’d normally ask are only just getting out of bed).

We should point out that this isn’t the first time that Imgur.com has been blocked by Virgin Media and similar incidents occurred in both 2016 and 2015. Likewise TalkTalk, Vodafone and Sky Broadband have all at some point or another blocked access to the site (here, here and here) and this is usually due to a configuration error in their filters or simply bad design.

Bugs like this have occurred for years and of course remain easy to circumvent via VPN or other methods. We have asked Virgin Media to comment.

UPDATE 8:26am

We’ve had a couple of readers saying that the block has now been resolved.

UPDATE 11:15am

A spokesperson for Virgin Media has told ISPreview.co.uk that they’re still “investigating” what happened during the early hours of this morning (it’s now resolved), although they say it appears to have been a “technical issue” with their Web Blocker system that is used to carry out requests from the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF).

“Virgin Media will only block URLs if compelled to do so through a court order or through the IWF. As matter of course Virgin Media does not carry out domain level blocking on sites reported to us by the IWF,” said the Spokesperson.

UPDATE 1:45pm

The IWF has offered some extra context.

Fred Langford, IWF Deputy CEO&CTO, said:

“A fault with Virgin Media’s filtering system was incorrectly signposting Virgin’s customers to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF). We spoke to someone at Virgin who confirmed that the problem is now resolved, but because the block incorrectly pointed people to the IWF URL List, we received a few complaints which we’ve been responding to.

We never condone over blocking and we don’t carry out the blocking and filtering ourselves. We provide a list of ‘live’ child sexual abuse URLs to ISPs and filterers who block them at URL level to help stop the revictimisation of sexual abuse victims. As soon as the criminal images and videos have been removed at source, the URL is removed from our list.

It’s incredibly frustrating for us, and other companies, when services are incorrectly blocked. I’d like to reassure people that it’s not due to the IWF list.”

The IWF added that there are presently 23 URLs (at URL level NOT domain level) relating to content on Imgur on their list. The list is 6,139 URLs long today, but by later this afternoon, due to the rate that they update the list, it could be more or less than that as they have a lot coming off (and going on) once the criminal content is removed.