UK ISP Virgin Media Suffers Broadband Outage After Routing Issue
Broadband ISP Virgin Media (O2) should now be coming back online after some of the provider’s customers suffered a partial outage of their internet connectivity this morning. This appears as if it could have stemmed from a peering/routing issue with some of their network partners (this may have also impacted other online services / providers).
According to Down Detector, the outage itself started at around 10am and only began to improve just before midday. A spokesperson for Virgin Media said: “We’re aware that some customers are experiencing intermittent issues with their services. We apologise for any inconvenience and are working to fix this as a priority.”
Feedback from customers indicates that some were able to get around the problem by switching to a third-party Domain Name System (DNS) provider, while others found that using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) was able to avoid the issue. In other words, the problem wasn’t so much with the physically broadband connection, but rather with how Virgin Media or their network / peering partners were routing the traffic.
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At this stage it’s not clear precisely what caused the issue, although the majority of Virgin Media’s broadband customers don’t appear to have been affected and most should now be back online. But we are still seeing reports from customers who cannot access remote office VPN systems or other services, such as Microsoft 365. Anything Azure-hosted seems to be problematic.
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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Whilst I noticed a bit of a blip earlier (with Github not loading in correctly) but I’m still up and running. I am running in modem only mode with my router resolving DNS via DoT through Cloudflare’s DNS service so I’m not running a typical user’s setup.
We are not using Virgin’s DNS servers and it made no difference whatsoever – the edge of the internet fell away, leaving our data flowing into an unacknowledged abyss! The redundant circuits that use BT also broke, as they still aggregate back into Virgin. Something big went wrong, 10 mins later everything came back, and we just had another short failure a few minutes back.
Same here. I use adguard DNS and also use a VPN on a laptop supplied by my employer. Testing from my devices revealed a 30 to 40% packet loss. A friend who lives 30 miles away was also seeing the same loss, at the same time as confirmed by the quality monitors I have in place. Thankfully I was able to tether to my mobile to avoid a lengthy trip to the office.
Did wonder why it was a bit slow this morning, using Cloudflare DNS, sites were slow loading/not loading at all.
My wife who works from home could not remotely assess the NHS peer to peer servers for 3 hours from 10am till 1pm
Yeah, i am with virgin media, and I also use nordvpn, but I have microsoft edge set up not to use the vpn, for obvious reasons, and edge couldn’t access the Internet during this time, were chrome and my other apps had no issues accessing the Internet
We are not suffered any issues recently until today but we are now suffering partial connection issues i.e. unable to access certain domains.
Tracert shows connections to these domains timing out on peering provided by Twelve99.net, which appears to be one of Virginmedia’s backhaul providers.