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Virgin Media cable customers suffer outage
Tuesday 18 December 2007 11:57:07 by John Hunt

Last night saw a major outage on the Virgin Media cable network as people nationwide were unable to connect to the Internet over their broadband connections. A post to the Virgin Media status page stated that the Digital TV service was also affected:

"Some customers Nationally may currently be experiencing a loss all Digital & Broadband services. Our engineers are aware of the issue and are working to restore normal service as quickly as possible. Virgin Media apologise for any inconvenience caused."

The problems started around 22:00 and continued through the night with users suffering from patchy connectivity until it was reported as resolved at 10:43 this morning. No cause has yet been reported.

[ Topic: Internet Service Providers | 17 comments | link to this item ]

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Posted by Guzzo over 2 years ago
ahhhhhh poor old Virgin. they do seem to be having such a rough time of it lately. I seem to remember that our house never lost the TV arial signal once in over thirty years. ahh the prce of progress

Posted by AndrueC over 2 years ago
Ah but you can't get 50Mb through your aerial..or at least not in the form of a digital download.

OTOH I have grave doubts about Virgin's ability to deliver that either so perhaps you have a point there :)

Posted by weegiegeek over 2 years ago
i doubt there's 50mbit allocated to all the freeview channels put together, the bitrate on some of them is abysmal...

On another note though, You might never have lost the signal once in over 30 years, but 30 years ago none of the (3?) tv stations were 24 hours, so any scheduled maintenance would've occurred in the middle of the night.

Sure, this wasn't scheduled downtime from VM but there's considerably more TO go wrong with things these days.

Posted by radiomarko over 2 years ago
The Register "This occurred as a result of an error during a routine maintenance process which affected some customers' modems and set top boxes."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/18/virgin_media_national_outage/

Posted by CARPETBURN over 2 years ago
[q]Sure, this wasn't scheduled downtime from VM but there's considerably more TO go wrong with things these days.[/q]
Obviously so considering they had a outage a month or so ago which they claim was due to a combo of air con and a fire. One has to question their reliabilty, i had an analogue cable service where i lived many years ago and when that went down it was always fixed within an hour or 2. Will they refund the hundreds of thousands of people the equivlent half a days money for when the service was down? lets face facts put virgin are a joke.

Posted by Dawn_Falcon over 2 years ago
Carpet - Well, if they are I'm missing the funny in it.

Posted by c_j_ over 2 years ago
"30 years ago none of the (3?) tv stations were 24 hours, so any scheduled maintenance would've occurred in the middle of the night."

How many people would actually notice if the *current* overnight stuff were interrupted?

On a vaguely related matter, why is there never ever a Test Card (F) on TV these days, so people can check their setups without having to rely on over-compressed broadcast material...

Posted by gayboy-ds over 2 years ago
Just how many "outages" has Virgin Media had this year? Not good at all!

Posted by AdamGz0r over 2 years ago
I was one of the users hit by this and it went off around 9pm and didnt come back on till 10am, I find 13 hours to fix a problem absolutely atrocious, and the fact it affected so many people is just beyond a joke.

Posted by AndrueC over 2 years ago
@c_j:Sadly because most people wouldn't know a good TV picture if you showed them one. People seem happy to live with 4:3 stretched to 16:9, excessive contrast, overbright images and low-bandwidth artifacting.

When *I* by a TV I usually spend at least an hour adjusting it. I wonder sometimes if most people bother at all.

Posted by Dawn_Falcon over 2 years ago
They "fixed" the actual problem quickly, Adam. But their hardware can't cope with every modem on rhe network wanting a new DHCP lease at once. Hence obtaining a new lease took a lot of people, well, hours.

Posted by Redtop over 2 years ago
Not only the long delay but when you tried to find out what was going on their 'free' 0800 number, to give you a stats report,wasn't working either, so that must of crashed from the number of people trying to find out what was happening. As usual Virgin are not very good at telling you anything.

Posted by AdamGz0r over 2 years ago
Dawn_Falcon: im sorry but that is rubbish, the modems sync and get an ip after they have finished syncing, the modems where simply not syncing at all

Posted by Dawn_Falcon over 2 years ago
Adam, go and check the modem logs. People over at cableforum have (http://www.cableforum.co.uk/board/12/33625681-national-broadband-outage.html)

"Waiting for DHCP"

Research before *you* say something is rubbish.

Posted by yellowhat over 2 years ago
Not really the place to say this, but is anybody else having problems recording with the "V" box. I have two, one is fine the other won't record more than ten minutes of a programme.

Posted by zev1t over 2 years ago
One thing I have noticed since the event is that the number of spams I'm getting has gone up enormously. Has one of their filters been taken out I wonder?

Posted by AdamGz0r over 2 years ago
Dawn_Falcon: maybe if you had cable you would know, it is rubbish as theyre was simply no signal on the frequency kthx