Virgin Media is down – here's everything we know about the outage

Still no ETA for an official fix

While the number of reports of Virgin Media issues has plummeted on Downdetector, many are still tagging the company on social media with continued problems – and its social media team says it can't yet provide an update on time for a fix.

On X (formerly Twitter) above, Virgin Media said at 12.30pm GMT that it doesn't "have any further information currently" on when the issues will be resolved.

So while the outage is now resolved for many, others are no doubt thinking of moving to a coffee shop for the afternoon...

Signs of recovery?

The good news for Virgin Media customers is that reports on Downdetector have now plummeted to around the 1,500 mark at the time of writing (from a peak of 10,000 at around 11.10am GMT).

That doesn't necessarily mean that all of the problems have been fixed, just that there aren't waves of new customers adding to the pile of complaints. But this is usually a good sign – and anecdotally some on the TechRadar team have found that their internet connection is back to full fitness.

We've asked Virgin Media to tell us in a statement when it's officially resolved the issues and will (hopefully) bring that to you soon.

Could you get compensation?

If you're working from home and still struggling with Virgin Media internet issues, your thoughts might be turning to compensation.

To its credit, Virgin Media is pretty clear about that on its compensation page (even if some might claim that's because it's down so often). Under its 'Automatic Compensation scheme' you're apparently eligible for "£9.76 per day for a total loss of service after 2 full working days from registering the loss of service to us".

On the downside, the issues need to be a "total loss of service" and you need to register the problems with Virgin Media either on the phone or using its service checker, which many on the TechRadar team have found to be very flaky today.

So while compensation is possible, there's a chance today's problems (currently heading towards three hours) may not qualify – and even if they do, claiming could be more trouble than it's worth.

It isn't just Virgin Media...

While Virgin Media has been by far the worst affected this morning, Downdetector is also showing smaller but notable spikes on other services – including BT, Xbox, Microsoft 365 and more.

Sometimes these parallel spikes are simply down to the ways people are reporting the problems (for example, recording it as a Teams rather than Virgin Media issue). But it also suggests that the issues could be DNS (or Domain Name System) related, which means you can't connect to the server to access websites.

When Community Fibre internet went down in the UK last week, many reported that logging into their router and choosing a different DNS (like '8.8.8.8') temporarily solved their problems, as it did using a VPN. Although there's not yet any evidence that doing this will help with today's Virgin outage...

A statement from Virgin

Virgin Media has just got back to us with the following statement: "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".

There's currently no estimated timescale for the fix, but it's good to get some acknowledgement that Virgin is working on it. In the meantime, it's back to phone tethering for many, or perhaps trying one of the best VPNs in case the issues are related to DNS problems...

And... Virgin's service checker is down

As if Virgin Media customers needed their blood pressure raising any higher today, the company's service tracker – which should tell you about known issues in your area – is currently down for many.

Looking at the map of Virgin Media reports on Downdetector, though, it's safe to say this is a nationwide issue, with issues reported from Plymouth to Dundee. We're currently bugging Virgin for an explanation and will update you as soon as we hear back.

Welcome to an unfortunate start to the week...

Hello, and commiserations if you're a Virgin Media customer who's having internet issues this morning. You're not alone – almost 10,000 customers have reported problems with landline internet this morning on Downdetector (above).

That includes several people on TechRadar. We've reached out to Virgin Media for comment on what's causing the problems and will report back as soon as we hear – but hopefully that dip in the graph above suggests that there are already signs of recovery (for some)...