Uncertainty Surrounds Virgin Media and O2 UK’s Community Forum Merger UPDATE
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.).
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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 😉 .
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UPDATE 4:03pm
Several sources have been in contact to help us fill in a few of the blanks. The key takeaway from this is that VMO2 seemed to have originally been aiming to return the newly consolidated forum and platform to life around April or May 2026, although that does depend upon everything going smoothly. As above, such complex migrations rarely go smoothly, so we think mid-2026 might be a better bet.
In other words, the forum is likely to remain offline for a fair bit longer.
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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They were probably working on it, but then remembered that in line with Virgin Media policy, they must screw it up.
😉
Oh no what will we do without all the narcissistic users on there.?
This story is worrying Mark – you got something coming out?
NP’s just got given the right to block anything internet wise for anyone under 18 without any reason – this is China 2.0
https://www.openrightsgroup.org/press-releases/mps-give-ministers-powers-to-restrict-entire-internet/
Good!
Internet access isn’t a human rights, it’s a privilege
It’s equally as dangerous as taking drugs or drinking, absolutely need a restriction
As a long term member of both Communities the message I received was May at the earliest although it may be several months
Do you have a copy of the message Dafydd? Was it from their support team or?
Unfortunately I can no longer access my personal messages but the possible May figure cam by a senior member of the team.
However, I got the Impression they were not sure
I tried to log something through the VM Community Forum today, and found it read only. One big difference between the VM forum and the O2 one is that people working for VM read their community forum, and you could get things done like checking your broadband or booking an engineer. The O2 one was more of a discussion forum and they would always tell me to ring them up. Given that I found O2 fairly useless compared with Virgin Mobile, I moved away from them once my contract ended.
I actually rang Virgin on 150 today and asked why. Support person was clueless about it?
since they both verge together theyve got worse….02 bills got higher n the customer service is worse….n theyve messed by bills up…not given me what i supposed to have….i wish id not gone with 02 now
At least they are maintaining a community forum unlike Vodafone who nuked theirs as soon as the Three merger was confirmed!
Months to merge 2 forums… seems a bit much.
The best database engineer on earth could have easily completed this merger with about 10 or 11 minutes of downtime at the most. This is because the expert would do ALL the work BEFORE turning the actual forum OFF.
First they would snapshot both forums’ databases then work on a script which properly merges both forums. This would be done while the real forums were still fully online.
Then they would test this script on many many more offline snapshots. To ensure that no errors/conflicts occur, and the generated/merged database works with the new forum system.
ONLY once all the hard work is DONE, ie. the merge script is perfected and finalized, would they turn OFF the forum. Take one last DB snapshots of both forums, load them into a fast computer and then run the perfected script to generate the merged Database. And bam you have a new forum merged properly.
VM seems to be tackling this BACKWARDS they have turned the forum OFF before they have done any WORK at all!
Whoever thought that turning off the forum is the first step of a forum merger simply has no idea what they’re doing. Two months of downtime for a DB merger is just laughable.
You can just tell that VM has no idea. The forum manager says “the forum will be offline for a bit”, which is simply laughable and proves he doesn’t have a clue. A real Database Engineer would know exactly how long it would take to run the merger script on the actual databases, right down to the second, because these things would have been meticulously calculated and pre-planned by the engineer.
This sums up Virgin perfectly this was literally the only place to get good support in case of a issue with a connection. 😀 They said a few weeks here we are 6 months later. Bye Bye virgin soon