Virgin Media Reports Coverage Problems

Virgin Media has today announced thousands of its 3.6 million of its broadband customers across the UK could have been hit by line failure following complications during the course of a maintenance project over the course of last night, leaving some ‘thousands’ with no access through today, in a move that looks set to prove highly damaging for the fledgling service provider.

The proble occurred during the course of line maintenance, and was said to leave customers without access from 10 minutes to a number of hours as the problem was rectified. As a result of an error in IP address settings, customer modems across the country were unable to access the internet, leading to the problems reported.

Whilst it was mostly broadband access affected by the problems, it is thought that some customers may also have experienced difficulties in their on-demand services and other interactive provision over the period, increasing the overall geographic spread of the problems.

Because the hardware automatically looks to renew IP addresses, systems were thought to have overloaded with the demand from across the entire network causing the outages experienced.

Virgin Media have today asked customers to re-boot their modems in order to ensure problems are fully resolved, with a view to bringing its entire network back online after the outages experienced.

Further, a spokesperson said the problems were contained and that they were continuing to implement all measures possible to rectify the problems.”Most of the problems occurred in the North West, Yorkshire and the Midlands and the majority of affected customers regained their service shortly after midnight. Our engineers are currently working to restore the few remaining connections as quickly as possible. We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused.”

It is thought that Virgin have yet to highlight specifically the problem or the source of the problem that lead to the widespread outages across the UK last night.

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