back to article Virgin Media goes TITSUP, RUINS Tuesday evening

UK internet service provider Virgin Media suffered a Total Inability To Support Usual Performance (TITSUP) event on Tuesday evening, leaving plenty of subscribers without broadband. The outage appears to have impacted customers across the United Kingdom and to have left the afflicted without terrestrial or wireless broadband …

  1. Peshman

    Service went down, then it was brought back up again.

    There's a story there somewhere.

    1. Vimes

      Re: Service went down, then it was brought back up again.

      The worse part was trying to figure out what was going on. After checking wired as well as wireless connections and restarting the router, I went to their site to check the current status. 'Good service' for broadband apparently.

      Bullshit. I was being forced to use my phone as a hot spot and connection through VM was non-existent.

      Despite this apparent lie I went and tried to run the test that they have on their site to check connection. I had problems there too, and the message produced suggested I call 150 from my virgin phone. I did so. All I got was an automated message telling me that they were too busy to deal with me, after which the system on the other end hung up. The help link shown on the page didn't work either. I couldn't even register my problem, let alone get any expectation of something radical - like actually getting the issue fixed!

      Apparently telling paying customers to bugger off when they call up to ask about why they're not getting what they've paid for is acceptable service in VMs eyes now.

      1. Peshman

        Re: Service went down, then it was brought back up again.

        You typed all of that just because your internet connection went down on a school night between dinnertime and 11pm? You don't even mention that you were vpn'd into your office to do some work so I can only assume that you weren't. I guess you've got your priorities sorted. Chill Dude. There are more important things in life to get worked up about.

        1. Vimes

          Re: Service went down, then it was brought back up again. @peshman

          You mean like piss poor service - that I'm paying for! - and being insulted by both being lied to and effectively told to fuck off when I have the gall to ask for help?

          You don't see what's wrong with that?

          1. Peshman

            Re: Service went down, then it was brought back up again. @peshman

            I should have mentioned that I'm also signed up with Virgin Media. I had dinner with the Mrs and then made a couple of calls to family and friends before going to bed. Everything was fine the next morning and my life carried on as normal. I get that this is an IT related site. Come on really? The internet connection goes down for a few hours one evening and people got seriously worked up over it? Go to the pub and have a pint with a mate until it comes back up again.

            1. Vimes

              Re: Service went down, then it was brought back up again. @peshman

              Go to the pub and have a pint with a mate until it comes back up again.

              You're assuming that people didn't have things they needed to get done online. Whilst that may have been the case for you that's still a big assumption when it's applied to anybody else.

              It's also wrong.

              I needed to check blood test results online last night as there was nobody left in the clinic to answer my questions. In my case the inability to do so caused quite a bit of distress until I finally got a very weak signal on my phone - slow but at least sufficiently strong to browse at snails pace.

              Expecting people to simply 'chill' is unrealistic when you don't have a clue as to what they need the access for. Please stop assuming this breakdown doesn't cause significant problems because I assure you it most certainly can.

              1. NotWorkAdmin

                Re: Service went down, then it was brought back up again. @peshman

                I hear the rage, and understand the frustration.

                It does, however, occur to me that a Reg reader ought to understand that while outages are generally rare, they do happen.

                And for another thing, were Virgin to hire enough staff to handle calls in the event of a system wide outage occurring at any given time, they would be charging you a heck of a lot more.

                Feels odd defending this company, because I hate them. With a passion.

                1. Vimes

                  Re: Service went down, then it was brought back up again. @peshman

                  And for another thing, were Virgin to hire enough staff to handle calls in the event of a system wide outage occurring at any given time

                  So you think just hanging up on customers and leaving them with no solution, help or even hint as to what the hell is happening is acceptable, and putting out information that was clearly false on their status page is OK?

                  All they had to do was modify the status page and change the recording on the phone to tell us that there was a problem and they were working to fix it. That doesn't take legions of help desk drones to do, and would have probably drastically cut down the number of calls. Most people are willing to wait a while after all if they know that it's being dealt with and a rough ETA for it to be fixed.

                  They couldn't even be bothered to do that, preferring instead to go down the route of spending far more time on twitter after the fact repeating the same message that there had been a problem (and interestingly always omitting what caused it - even when asked directly) rather than keeping their own site up to date in the first place.

                  It was an extremely inefficient use of their own time that just lead to even greater frustration for customers.

                  1. Cynic_999

                    Re: Service went down, then it was brought back up again. @peshman

                    "

                    All they had to do was modify the status page and change the recording on the phone to tell us that there was a problem and they were working to fix it. That doesn't take legions of help desk drones to do, and would have probably drastically cut down the number of calls. Most people are willing to wait a while after all if they know that it's being dealt with and a rough ETA for it to be fixed.

                    "

                    "We cannot fix the problem because all our staff have been diverted into manning the phones in order to be able to deliver this message instead of appearing to be rude."

                    As for updating the automatic recording and status page - maybe that is done remotely after hours, and could not be achieved on account of the fact that the Internet connection was broken ...

                    1. PNGuinn
                      Mushroom

                      Re: Service went down, then it was brought back up again. @peshman

                      1. Outages happen. Equipment failures. Upgrade SNAFUs. Configuration cockups. Workers grubbing up a cable (not necessarily during "working hours"). Pikeys knicking copper or what they think is copper... The list goes on.

                      2. Virmin Media is big enough (and should be professional enough) to realise that outages can happen at any time for pretty much any reason,

                      3. A professional organisation should try to guard against every possible failure. That means careful planning and built in redundancy. Or honestly admit they are a mom and pop / bunch of cowboys outfit - caveat emptor. (One can wish...)

                      4. They should know that however good they are they'll get caught out sometime - AND PLAN ACCORDINGLY. As others have said here it's not difficult to quickly update the web page and answerphone messages / top of the telephone tree message / social media with useful info. For crying out loud there should be default "we've screwed it up again" boilerplate already available. One click and its all updated. Add info to the boilerplate and one click... etc.

                      5. SKILLED staff on duty (not just on call) to take charge of the situation, diagnose the problem and organise the solution.

                      6. LEARN from your mistakes and near misses and what you can glean from everyone else's and improve your systems accordingly.

                      6. VM - if you are'nt doing all of that you really ARE a bunch of useless .......

                      We are at the point where the internet is becoming for very many people (not just big businesses) an essential service like 'leccy, gas, water or telephone service. This will only get sorted when legislation sets minimum levels of service with suitable heavy penalties for failure.

                    2. Vimes

                      Re: Service went down, then it was brought back up again. @peshman

                      We cannot fix the problem because all our staff have been diverted into manning the phones in order to be able to deliver this message instead of appearing to be rude

                      I never suggested that. Information was what I was looking for above all else.

                      Get a single person to record a message and then add it to the automated message put out to the customers calling in. Not time consuming, presumably not difficult to do and at least lets people understand what's happening, even if they don't get to talk to somebody.

                      As for updating the automatic recording and status page - maybe that is done remotely after hours, and could not be achieved on account of the fact that the Internet connection was broken

                      Which in itself would point to bigger problems with their setup if that really is the case.

                      Having a website showing the status of a server stored on that very same server is questionable to say the least, especially since it's supposed to shown when it's not working too - which is it can't really do if the server it's running on has fallen over or lost connectivity to the outside world.

                      In any case the fact it could be viewed would tend to suggest it was accessible.

                      As for changing the status page, I personally think it's ridiculous to suggest that it can only be edited during the day. Admin interfaces don't shut down just because it's 17:30. If I can sort out a very slow but nevertheless reasonably stable connection in an area of poor reception then I find it difficult to believe that somebody at VM couldn't change it using a 3G connection.

                2. Down not across

                  Re: Service went down, then it was brought back up again. @peshman

                  And for another thing, were Virgin to hire enough staff to handle calls in the event of a system wide outage occurring at any given time, they would be charging you a heck of a lot more.

                  Well, if they actually were honest, and updated (frequently) their own outage page (rather than lie that Broadband is all fine) that would most likely have had fair reduction in number of calls.

                  Yes problems do happen. But for f-sake be honest to your customers and keep them updated especially via outages page since there is one. If the outage page said there are issues with broadband, ideally brief description of the cause and ETA many people would be lot less upset and would probably wait lot more calmly for the service to be restored.

                  1. Anonymous Coward
                    Anonymous Coward

                    Re: Service went down, then it was brought back up again. @peshman

                    The whole infrastructure of internet in the UK is just a big laugh. I got 500Mb/s up and down on fibre optics.

                    No line rental (which is ridiculous on fibre optics) and hardly any downtime.

                    Then again I don't live in the UK; my ISP is xs4all.nl

    2. Vimes

      Re: Service went down, then it was brought back up again.

      Anybody wanting to take complaints further should try emailing this guy:

      http://www.ceoemail.com/s.php?id=9632

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Story? They came so close but missed an obvious Reg-style headline too...

      "Customers not impressed as Virgin goes down on them, ruins Tuesday evening"

      Subheading: "Poor performance blamed on inexperienced staff" (*)

      (*) Yeah, I made that bit up, but it *ought* to be the reason :-)

    4. Florida1920

      Re: Service went down, then it was brought back up again.

      "There's a story there somewhere."

      The company's made no statement The Reg can find on its various blogs and social outlets, but has apparently told customers the problem has been resolved.

      The Greatest Story Never Told!

  2. x 7

    Probably the strong winds affecting the cables. Virgin West Coast had cable problems last night causing speed restrictions and hour+ delays

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      you may want to get a joke icon on there, it's going to go whizzing over some peoples heads.

  3. Sartori

    Interesting to see it made the news here, in the North West I noticed the email service was down last night but fibre broadband was working fine, thankfully.

  4. werdsmith Silver badge

    Everything on Virgin Media was working perfectly for me all last night, and for my son who was doing XBOX and that PC game where you build stuff, and for my daughter who watched Netflix on a hudl.

    So I don't know what this is all about.

    1. Down not across

      Everything on Virgin Media was working perfectly for me all last night, and for my son who was doing XBOX and that PC game where you build stuff, and for my daughter who watched Netflix on a hudl.

      So I don't know what this is all about.

      Oh good for you. It works for you so why the fuss. Selfish git. Well, others were not so lucky.

      It bombed out almost bang on 8pm and didn't come back until 11pm.

      The most frustrating thing about it is sitting in the queue for 30 mins before being booted off. That is if you even got into the queue, as some attempts were greeted with "We're busy. F**** off. HAND"

      Their trouble checker gave up on finding a fault. Their web page did mention TV outage.

      However "Broadband: Good" with green light was rather insulting. You would think they'd manage to keep the web page updated.

      If their outage page was actually updated I suspect the number of calls would also be reduced. It is the total lack of communication (no, twatter is not communication in my book) that is the most frustrating.

      All in all typical VM. When it works it is rather good. When there is a problem they just make it even worse.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Yes, that was the most annoying - go to the Virgin Media Service Status page and it showed all was okay with broadband, so you think it must just be you and stick on the phonw for ages only to be told - yeah everyone has a problem.

        WTF?? Just update the one single webpage designed to be used by people to see whether there is a known problem or not!!!

        1. wikkity

          > Just update the one single webpage designed to be used by people to see whether there is a known problem or not!!!

          They couldn't update the page, their internet cnnection was down.

          1. Martin-73 Silver badge

            That is why you host the status page on another provider, and update it using mobile devices if necessary

          2. PNGuinn
            Flame

            "They couldn't update the page, their internet cnnection was down"

            That's the sort of comment that should be too cras for even a joke icon - but I'd not be in the least surprised if you'e totally correct. Upvoted.

        2. GarethB

          Strange when I checked the status page it was showing the problem although it did say it was an issue with the TV interactive service and broadband was ok. Both clearly use the same network. ETA for completion was 10:55.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: So I don't know what this is all about...

      That's excellent news werdsmith, thanks for keeping us up-to-date.

      Anything happen today you want to share?

      1. werdsmith Silver badge

        Re: So I don't know what this is all about...

        That's excellent news werdsmith, thanks for keeping us up-to-date

        Well not really, because you can't put stuff that people don't want to read on a rant page because it winds them up. Even if it is the truth.

        But the article seems to imply that the outage affected all VM customers in the UK, and I was just trying to point out that it didn't.

        However, I appreciate that truths against the general negativity are a heinous crime so I'll leave it there.

        Edit: Having read down the rest of the discussion it seems there were many of us unaffected and happy to announce so. So UYFA.

    3. This post has been deleted by its author

  5. Lee D Silver badge

    People moaned about it on Facebook.

    More of my friends on VM responded that they had no problem at all than ever experienced a problem. Localised problems like this happen ALL THE TIME. Sure, it's annoying, but with BT I used to get these despite being only a handful of metres from the exchange.

    With VM, every time one of these "national outages" has been announced, I've actually been able to post on The Reg article about it or on Facebook etc. from my VM connection. The worst outage I've ever had was when the little gits pulled the cables out of the green VM box at the end of the road. I was back up in an hour (VM van arrived within 10 minutes!).

    1. Alien8n

      Had that round here, VM van came round the next day looking for the source of the outage. As I'd walked home from the pub the night before I was able to point him to the the green box about a mile down the road that had all the switches pulled out of it by drunken idiots the previous night. Everything was back up and running as normal about half an hour later.

  6. Ben 5

    Down across southern England

    Looking at Twitter, it was down across southern England - the call centre went into meltdown. Virgin Media were only replying to tweets - I assume they didn't want to post anything as then it would appear on the front page of their Twitter feed. They could at least have put something on their service status page which all the way through declared a perfect service!

    They could at least have posted something to their status page which declared a good service all the way through.

  7. james 68

    "UK internet service provider Virgin Media suffered a Total Inability To Support Usual Performance (TITSUP) event on Tuesday evening..."

    Both work and home are on Virgin fiber lines and they had no problems at all yesterday, bit slower than usual maybe but they certainly didn't drop out. I guess Northern Ireland was lucky.

    1. werdsmith Silver badge

      Sshhhh! People get upset.

  8. TRT Silver badge

    Something about...

    Dammit Janet, I didn't know you were a Virgin.

  9. eJ2095

    The problem was

    That some one googled for google in google and broke the internet

  10. Nick Kew
    Facepalm

    Must've been me ...

    I returned on Tuesday evening after a weekend's enforced absence from the 'net. Virgin cable worked fine for me - from southwest England - but I had lots and lots to catch up on.

  11. Bernard M. Orwell

    Cardiff here. No problems last night with VM whatsoever. Slight hiccup resulting in 20 second outage in connection at about 4pm, nothing beyond that.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The most amazing thing

    is the brimstone people spew just because they lose their-oh-so-precious internet for an hour or two.

    Sad, utterly sad....

    Go put on a DVD, hoover the house, take the spouse, kids, onanists tool box, whatever, just go and do something else for a small period of time....

    1. Vimes

      Re: The most amazing thing

      No. it's brimstone spewn because we encounter issues, have the gall to ask for help only to be effectively told to FOAD by the company. That's not only annoying - it's insulting.

  13. Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
    FAIL

    Failure

    of a single component in Brentford knocks out 1/2 their network?

    Do VM management know about backups or think redundancy only something that happens to the low level techs who try to keep the network going?

    Oh and please change the script at your 'help' center..... we all try turning it off and on again now... and inform the 'help' center that you're having network problems

    1. Alien8n

      Re: Failure

      It could be worse, the entire card processing network for UK's banks is routed through a single exchange in Paddington. As we found out a few years ago when the whole system went down due to a fire in the Paddington exchange caused by the flooding of the exchange.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Failure

      Mention of redundancy reminds me of stories from comp.risks (ah, the good old days of usenet before this new-fangled web thing) of companies with well planned multiple redundant networks who only discovered too late that all the seperate netwroks they were using had cables routed through the same duct at some point, or worse, were all buying their connectivity from the same provider and found that all of the multiple routes went down at the same time!

  14. EddieD

    Hmm

    It seems to me that yet anothe problem that was only affecting London and the Home Counties has become "TOTAL UK BLACKOUT OH MY GOD THE HUMANITY"

    No-one I know here in the heathen wilderness of Scotland had a problem, my family in the bleak wastelands of the North Midlands didn't have a problem, nor seemingly did the folk I have chatted with in Wales.

    In terms of numbers, it may be affecting more folk than outages up here - which do happen, they just don't get mentioned as not enough folk get affected, but please, try and maintain some sense of proportion.

    I will agree, wholeheartedly, totally, unreservedly agree with the folk who say that Virgin Media have totally shit customer service and information in such instances, and for that - along with the RC4 issue and various other matters relating to data security - they deserve to be first against the wall when the revolution comes. Honesty is always far better than misinformation and extempore evasion.

    1. Lee D Silver badge

      Re: Hmm

      Worse than that. I live inside the M25. Nothing. Not a problem at all. Perfect, working, full speed Internet all night long.

      And judging by my Facebook, lots of others on VM were basically going "Huh?" because they had no problem either.

      It's "semi-outage to select geographic area", and then being blown up to represent the whole VM network.

      1. Vimes

        Re: Hmm @Lee D

        I'm in Bracknell, and the connection there wasn't working.

        And if it was only a few people affected why was their customer phone line in meltdown such that I've never seen before with any other company of a similar size? If they can't deal with the calls coming in then that suggests the impact is far bigger than you think it is.

        1. Vimes

          Re: Hmm @Lee D

          I might add that their twitter feed is also in meltdown. Even now. Repeated requests for an explanation just result in the same old tired apology.

          And some of the locations cited in them are well outside the south east (I only bothered checking a few of the conversations out of curiosity).

        2. ContentsMayVary

          Re: Hmm @Lee D

          >And if it was only a few people affected why was their customer phone line in meltdown such that I've never seen before with any other company of a similar size? If they can't deal with the calls coming in then that suggests the impact is far bigger than you think it is.

          It probably affected a sizeable percentage of their customers. Anything more than 10% is likely to cause customer phone line meltdown. But it was far from all of them. (I'm in Scotland, and obviously it didn't affect us up here.)

        3. Anonymous Coward
          Joke

          Re: Hmm @Lee D

          "why was their customer phone line in meltdown such that I've never seen before with any other company of a similar size?"

          I think that's the default status of Virgins support line.

          I think they pay for one outsourced guy in India. He works damn hard but if more than 2 calls come in at a time a backlog starts building up. If you hit the time he goes for lunch you can be waiting for hours.

          1. Vimes

            Re: Hmm @Lee Dc @Mr ChriZ

            I think that's the default status of Virgins support line.

            Also possible I suppose. This is the first occasion I've had any reason to call them about my service.

            TBH my frustration is caused much more by the response to the outage rather than the outage itself. When things are running smoothly then everything's fine. It's just a real shame than whenever there's a problem things seem to start to rapidly fall apart.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Hmm

        If this great nation's capital city - the seat of justice, the nest of royalty and the colon of the world's financial services - can't post to Twitter for a couple of hours, then that is indeed news.

        1. PNGuinn

          "Re: If this great nation's capital city"

          You forgot the real source of the problem: "The anus of politics"

  15. Primus Secundus Tertius

    Whose fault?

    I thought it was no longer Beardie's fault, but some American: name of Malone.

    The Mal One indeed!

  16. P. Lee
    Boffin

    "Break in the fibre caused routing issues"

    Isn't that what routing protocols are supposed to fix? -----------------> Fibre Man ---->

  17. Badvok
    Happy

    Oooops, I knew I shouldn't have downloaded my 25GB Easter Surprise from a certain game company all at once, sorry people!

    (And as someone who remembers seeing GIFs loading line-by-line I still can't believe that it took less than half an hour.)

  18. Stuart Halliday
    Facepalm

    Everyone has problems. It's how you deal with them that separates the grownups from the cowboys.

    Just tell us Virgin, you gain much more respect from us.

    1. Vimes

      Indeed.

      - Fail to give accurate status on page.

      - Fail to answer phone with anything more than an automated message which consists of little more than 'We're busy, now FOAD and leave us alone!' (which is as insulting as it is annoying)

      - For some reason they only let me test my connection three times a day.

      Overall fail.

      That last one is an odd one too. The only people using it would presumably be those having problems, so why would Virgin Media want to create a rod for their own backs by limiting this and pissing off customers that are probably already annoyed enough as it is?

      1. ashdav

        @Vimes

        It's engineering,shit happens.

        Grow up and get over your sense of entitlement.

        You have a silver only because of the number of posts you've made.

        Any relevance is mute.

        (How old are you?)

        1. Vimes

          Re: @Vimes

          It's engineering,shit happens.

          Agreed, but then why weren't VM in a position to at least tell customers what was going on? Sounds like exceptionally poor planning to me - especially if they should be expecting this to occasionally be an issue.

          Grow up and get over your sense of entitlement.

          Expecting to be told why I'm not getting the service I'm paying for is the same as showing a sense of entitlement? Seriously?

          1. illiad

            Re: @Vimes

            yeah yeah, IF that was BT, it would be WEEK before they even noticed it !!!

  19. Joe Montana

    Outage

    My cable was down for a couple of hours in the evening, because i work from home and internet access is very important for that i also have an adsl line which remained up so i simply switched to that...

    I did however check the virgin status page, which claimed there was no problem with broadband in my area, so the problem here is one of miscommunication. Most people upon seeing there is no problem with the service will assume their own equipment is at fault and waste time trying to troubleshoot it.

    What they should have done is updated the status page, and changed the recorded message to indicate there is a problem.

    Outages happen, we're not paying for five nines of uptime so most users will understand and wait for it to come back up, and not waste the time of the helpdesk staff who can't actually do anything about it anyway.

  20. Amorous Cowherder
    Pint

    Not in the Ware ( Herts. ) area it didn't. I've been busily flushing backups up to an online storage site and never noticed anything untoward.

  21. macjules

    Could have a better tagline ...

    C'mon El Reg! "Virgin Goes Down" is all you need.

  22. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    .......the outage hit around about dinner time..........

    You mean it was off all afternoon?

    1. Locky

      Re: .......the outage hit around about dinner time..........

      It wah back on by tea, nee bother

    2. Pookietoo

      Re: .......the outage hit around about dinner time..........

      That's lunch - dinner is at eight.

      1. illiad

        Re: .......the outage hit around about dinner time..........

        ahem... http://www.history-magazine.com/dinner2.html

        TL; DR ?? well try wiki... :/

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinner

      2. x 7

        Re: .......the outage hit around about dinner time..........

        dinner is whenever you are sober enough to drink it

  23. eJ2095

    I think what annoyed people the most

    Was that we had to speak to members of the family

  24. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    easynet

    a customer of mine can get to google, but not twitter/bbc/any other part of the internet. They are with Easynet Surestream or something.

    Status page says

    "Virgin Media fiber break still ongoing. Pending updates from field engineers.

    1200m of cable needs to be pulled through the ducting, unfortunately this is causing issues as some of the ducting is blocked. "

    so as of now this is still ongoing and has spilled over a bit

    http://support.uk.easynet.net/status_details.aspx?service=1&action=1

  25. phuzz Silver badge

    In Bristol I was having big problems accessing anything in the US, but UK stuff was fine.

  26. x 7

    Should be back to normal now. Railtrack have sorted the cables out for Virgin West Coast

  27. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    My VM connection worked perfectly all evening as it does nearly all evenings ...

    I also get a fast connection (106Mbps down / 6.3Mbps up) on a 100Mbps contract and the Superhub gives me powerful WIFI.

    I'm not making this up and I don't work for VM or have any financial interest in them.

  28. Trollslayer

    Me? Virgin?

    Hardly!

  29. Chris 171
    Facepalm

    Still nice to know

    I appreciate these stories as it lets me know that it wasn't just me, tho all the resetting did create the mother of all IP conflicts on my network which necessitated a full router/switch reset and associated pain.

    Web was still accessible just very slow & wouldn't hold a web radio stream without cutting every few seconds. Yet speed test sites were still saying a had 50mb+ connection.

    Frustrating that VM don't seem to update status pages when they should. Id have just played some records & not touched a thing had I known.

  30. Chris Evans

    Outages happen!

    How companies deal with problems is the important part.

    How quickly is it resolved?

    How often does it happen?

    How informative (honest) to their customers are they?

    Any decent company will have a status server on another network that logs all outages including ones that affect say just one exchange. The logs should be public for a year or so.

    That way potential customers can make informed choices.

  31. Terry 6 Silver badge

    VM service

    "They could at least have put something on their service status page which all the way through declared a perfect service!"

    It's a long standing issue with VM.

    They don't tell the truth on the web page, and often don't tell their front line support staff what's going on so they go through the whole switch it off and on again routine.

  32. TVC

    According to Zen a digger went through a fibre cable and took it out. Zen routed round it and although the networked slowed there was no outage. I never even noticed. Virgin did not and so were down for hours.

    Moral - get a decent Internet Provider - EG ZEN!

    From Zen

    At around 12.30pm yesterday one of the fibre connection bearers on our West Coast link was cut off, caused by digging on a line about 11km outside of Gloucester. This was on the route between our Manchester and London data centres and it affected most of the services we provide – broadband, leased lines, hosting… anything that requires an internet connection.

    What it meant was that we had to temporarily distribute traffic flowing between the north and south across our East Coast connection to try and minimise any impact. And while that provides a short term solution, it brings along other issues. Essentially, it’s like trying to fit eight people into a four-seat car. You can imagine what that looks like – not much space to move, and a car that travels really slowly.

    So our tech team set to work. Using our Peer & Transit connections, they were able to distribute customers’ demands across a much wider network. This meant we could dispense all our traffic and reduce demand, meaning the impact of the breakage on our customers was removed by around 3pm.

    We weren’t the only ISP affected by the cut-off; amongst others, Virgin’s customers also lost some their services. However, while we were able to resolve the situation in just under 2.5 hours, a lot of Virgin’s customers were left in the dark until about 11pm.

  33. illiad

    well I was using it *heavily * last night... are you sure you dont mean 11AM or some BST bleep-up??? :D

  34. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Work vs Home..

    My home VM connection in Gloucester was fine yesterday eve, however as I work in I.T. and have clients using VM and one of our fibres is VM, we were not immune, and one of the outages was around 24 hours total - not good.

    It was interesting how patchy it was - myself and my colleagues with home VM connections were unaffected - as were a handful of our business customers - but we did also see "potentially related" problems affecting ENTA (way beyond a 4 hour fix) and Talk-Talk

    Thankfully we don't put all our internets in one basket...

    EDIT:

    Having just tried facebook, I think there may be ongoing routing issues....

  35. bwrl

    Ironically, this happened the very same day that Virgin warned against moves by Ofcom that would reduce network reliability:

    http://www.totaltele.com/view.aspx?C=0&ID=489545

  36. scasey

    A Tuesday *evening* - How about an entire week?!

    Are you aware that Virgin broadband has been, and remains, down in Knightsbridge, London (SW3 1LR) since April 24th? Their online service status invariably states 'Good Service', but their very helpful, polite, but ineffectual support staff inform me (every time I call, which is more than once a day) that 'the online service status information isn't necessarily an accurate indication of the service status'.

    One chap, very honestly, did express deep surprise, and said, 'yes, this is very bad. I don't know how it can take this long to fix it. It is down for many people, and they are all very unhappy'.

    Oh yes, sadly there is no BT fibre service to this postcode. This is a real shame.

    Each time I call I'm told that the service will be back in X hours. X varies, but is always suspiciously long enough to ensure that there has been a shift change...

    Some news, that isn;'t nonsense, would be very much appreciated.

    1. scasey

      Re: A Tuesday *evening* - How about an entire week?!

      Just an update -

      As of now, the Virgin service to the ENTIRE POSTCODE of London, SW3 1LR REMAINS DOWN. It has been down now, for ELEVEN days, for 'TWO to THREE HUNDRED people'.

      Sorry for shouting. There's little else I can do to ease the frustration.

      Of course, the very helpful telephone support person told me that it will be back up by 'between 4pm and 5pm today'. As ever, my breath isn't held.

      Any news? Anyone? Bueller?..

      1. scasey

        Re: A Tuesday *evening* - How about an entire week?!

        The service returned around midday on 8th May, after a full 14 days downtime. Very glad it's back. But, 14 days? Really?!

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like