Virgin Media O2 Business Users with Static IPs Suffer UK Broadband Outage UPDATE2
Customers of UK broadband ISP Virgin Media O2 Business (VMO2), specifically those with a Static IP address assigned to their connection, are reporting that the provider suffered a major service outage yesterday that appears to have started at around midnight the day before and is still be impacting some users this morning.
The fault wasn’t publicly confirmed to customers until mid-morning yesterday, when support staff on social media began responding to complaints with the following statement: “We’re currently experiencing an outage affecting our Static IP Broadband customers who may be seeing a total loss of service. We’re working hard to get this fixed as soon as possible. We hope to have this working in the next few hours.”
The good news is that some customers were able to reconnect normally by early yesterday afternoon, but this is not universal and some users are continuing to report ongoing issues with the service this morning. As one of our readers said: “Looking at our Chita router, it looks like the GRE Tunnel credentials have gone A.W.O.L and it will not connect. Basic IP connectivity through the diagnostic section of the GUI doesn’t work either (using the normal public dynamic address of the CPE).”
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The latest update we’ve seen from VMB’s social media team on X was at 8:17am this morning (here), which simply said they’re “[awaiting] an update on the Static IP outage from our technical team.” ISPreview has also contacted VMB in the hope of securing more information, although VMB does have a bit of a history when it comes to problems with Static IP addresses – keeping customers informed during a major outage is perhaps not one of their strongest areas.
UPDATE 11am
Customers that were still reporting issues this morning appear to now be able to connect. A new configuration has to be pushed out by support to their routers manually, with a reboot needed if the device doesn’t do it by itself. But we’ve still not had a comment from VMB on the problems, which is really quite poor given that we asked for one several hours ago.
UPDATE 12:16pm
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We’ve had a comment from VMB.
A Spokesperson for VMB said:
“We apologise to any business customer who may have experienced issues with their broadband service yesterday. This was resolved yesterday afternoon.”
The underlying issue may well have been resolved yesterday afternoon, but some customers complain they weren’t able to get back online until this morning. The odd customer has also complained that their assigned Static IP address has been changed as a result, which doesn’t sound terribly Static.
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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yes, its all been a bit crap… becoming a trend here with VMB…the wanted to send techs out to fix and even with my 12 hour fix, cant come until tuesday !!
anyway, services restored but with different Static IP’s
really poor service, and total lack of communication. Spend nearly 3 hours on the phone with them and they never admitted there was a problem..
Are they in breach of SLA then? if so £££££
Unfortunately not. There is an SLA of sorts for VMB, but essentially the compo is defined in the SLA agreement and works roughly like the Ofcom auto-comp scheme of a few quid a day, it’s not consequential losses.
So more like £ than ££££. And that’s assuming that there isn’t a “qualifying period” that means they’ve got 24/48 hours grace. If you’re really interested, VMB terms are available on the web, but I can’t be bothered to go and read umpteen pages of small print for a company that doesn’t give a hoot about its customers.
Their T&C for it is;
If you have the Voom Fibre service, restoration credits are not payable for the 16, 24 or 48 hour fault response times. If you have the 12-hour fault response time, and we fail to resolve your fault within 12 hours, you have 30 days from the date the fault is resolved to request a service credit amount equal to the number of days without service/ 365, multiplied by the amount actually paid by you under your current Option in the previous 12 months.
They’re still using the horrific GRE tunnels method, reduced MTU and all the shenanigans it creates. It’s the worst implementation imaginable, and it has never been robust, so this is hardly news sadly.
Agree with Vince, in 2023 they are still running GRE tunnel (1990’s protocol) over their own network to connect to equipment in their datacentre to then give the end user static IP. This bodge was supposed to be short term 10 years ago…
and we are down again this morning… all very frustrating
Down again from 10:40pm. Second time today. 10 hours down time last night…. .best was a “tech support” got me back online by deleting all my hub settings
I really wished I’d read these comments before going with virgin business. My residential line is perfect. This is just, well not fit for purpose. I am literally losing money by the hour and customers for life possibly.
Virgin business line is stealing a living while destroying SME.
Well done virgin take a bow. Cretins.