Uncertainty Surrounds Virgin Media and O2 UK’s Community Forum Merger

Over a month has now passed since broadband and mobile providers Virgin Media and O2 (VMO2) closed their respective customer community forums to new postings as part of plans to merge and upgrade the platform (here). But the operator still doesn’t seem to know when this process will complete and won’t say what platform they’re adopting.

Community forums are an incredibly popular and useful tool for customers of such services to raise their issues and get support, even during periods where the telecoms provider itself might seem to be unresponsive (community members often help each other out). Until now Virgin Media and O2 have tended to run separate forums, which are a legacy of their pre-merger years.

However, at the end of January 2026 we reported that both operators were about to start a major process, which would both upgrade the forum platform to a new system (they still decline to say what platform will be used) and also merge both forums together (posts, stats, member accounts etc.).

At the time we remarked that upgrading and merging such a large database of historic customer content can be a real nightmare to pull off smoothly (complex database migrations rarely go without problems), which seemed likely to be the reason why neither operator could specify how long the downtime would last (i.e. they can’t be sure themselves).

Nevertheless, a long time has now passed without any updates, which is starting to result in some customers complaining to ISPreview about the protracted downtime of such a useful community support tool. We put some questions to VMO2 about this, but they still decline to say what platform is being adopted, where the new forum will be located and when it would be ready.

A VMO2 spokesperson told ISPreview:

“We have decided to bring together our forum communities into one platform, with our focus remaining on ensuring we can provide helpful advice and support to customers of both Virgin Media and O2. Our existing forums will be temporarily unavailable while our teams work on this migration, which will be completed as soon as possible.”

The wait goes on, but in the meantime, it is at least still possible to read the old forums, even if you can’t make any new posts. We did attempt to press VMO2 on whether it would be a matter of weeks, months or years until they’re finished, but at the time of writing no response had been received. Hopefully it’s back soon.

As above, we wouldn’t be at all surprised if this was proving to be a harder task than first imagined. But by way of a shameless plug, ISPreview does run its own O2 Forum and Virgin Media Forum for customers to have a natter 😉 .