Virgin users hit by online outage

Thousands of Virgin Media customers have had their broadband disconnected following problems with a routine maintenance procedure.

The problem hit customers nationwide on Monday night, with some customers re-connected within 10 minutes, while others had to wait several hours.

Virgin Media has said it is does not know how many of its 3.6 million broadband customers were hit overall.

A spokesman said Virgin was working to reconnect the remaining “few thousand”.

The problem was caused when the routine maintenance caused Virgin’s set-top boxes and modems to lose their “leased” IP address, the unique number that identifies them on the internet.

The set-top boxes and modems automatically attempted to “renew” the lease, but demand for potentially hundreds of thousands of new IP addresses hit Virgin’s own routers which handle the requests.

The problem hit not just broadband connections, but also the firm’s on demand and interactive services, which are delivered over the net.

A spokesman for Virgin Media advised customers to re-start their modems and set-top boxes.

He added: “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.”

Virgin said it had not yet identified the problem during the maintenance which had caused the issue.

News source: BBC News

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