Virgin Media O2 UK Fix Midnight Broadband Connectivity Fault
Some customers of broadband ISP Virgin Media (VMO2) may be pleased to know that the operator has now resolved a curious connectivity problem, which for the past few days has been causing a short period of internet disruption at just before midnight every single night.
On each occurrence, the problem would typically start at around 11:30pm and then resolve itself shortly after midnight. During this period, the broadband connection is often still live, yet some websites and other internet services would struggle to connect. The seemingly sporadic issue also appears to have impacted some of Virgin Media’s business customers too.
The usual suspects of DNS or peering/routing come to mind, with the Domain Name System (DNS) looking most likely to be the culprit as some customers were able to work around the issue by changing their primary and secondary DNS servers to one provided by a third-party (Google Public DNS, OpenDNS etc.).
The good news is that the ISP has now resolved the problem and do not expect a reoccurrence tonight, but we’ll keep an eye out just in case.
A Virgin Media spokesperson said:
“We apologise to those customers whose broadband services were briefly disrupted overnight this week. No further disruption is expected.”
The issue won’t have been noticed by many of the operator’s customers, as most will have been asleep during those hours.
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 and Linkedin.
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Personally had this 14/15/16th but not 17th. Router is in modem mode and I’m not using their DNS.
Outage was 20-35 minutes each.
Same here. I can’t pin this on DNS either as my network is set to use OpenDNS. Changing to CLoudflare or Quad9 didn’t resolve anything. As Mark said, the router remained connected with a valid IP throughout each outage (which for me caused all services to be unreachable – websites, Netflix etc. and caused mobiles to switch to cellular data). VM hub is/was in modem mode with an Asus router providing connectivity.
Same here, modem mode using 1.1.1.1
I had the exact same issue, Hub 3 in modem mode, connectivity stayed up on the VM network side and nothing in the Hub’s logs to suggest otherwise. Renewed DHCP lease on my router, it still had a valid WAN IP but no proper connectivity.
Same here – it wasn’t a DNS problem for me as it was affecting pings (showed up in BQM)
Similar problems on a business connection. Definitely not DNS related.
13th: Multiple small drops 22.30, and 3 x 23.30 to midnight.
14th: 00.00 to 00.15 ish and 02.30 to 02.45.
15th: 00.15 to 00.30 ish, a small blip at 00.50, 23.30 to 23.50ish.
16th: 00.15 short blip, 01.40 to 02.55ish entire loss of service. 03.00 to 05.45 iro 25% to 50% packet loss, 23.40 to 23.59 total loss of service.
I have this problem on TalkTalk once in a while.
Connectivity dies, but I’m still conntected to the Internet. DNS doesn’t resolve. Can’t access anything.
And I use Google DNS to boot…
glad to know its fixed now
Whatever they did in June, it’s still doing it now in October. Only on WiFi, it’s OK on broadband mobile connection.