Virgin Media O2 says it has restored broadband for its customers, after thousands in the UK reported they were unable to access the internet.
Downdetector, which tracks websites, showed more than 26,000 people reported their home broadband was not functioning on Tuesday morning.
It came as Virgin contacted customers to advise them of price increases – averaging at a 13.8% higher bill.
The firm apologised for inconvenience caused by the outage.
It had previously told customers it was aware of an issue with broadband services for Virgin Media, and was “working to identify and fix the problem as quickly as possible”.
Virgin has around 5.8 million home broadband users across the UK, according to its latest figures.
Like other internet suppliers, Virgin is raising its prices from April 2023 for existing customers.
It is also changing the terms of its contracts to bring it in line with most other suppliers, which increase the cost of broadband contracts by the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) or Retail Prices Index (RPI) measures of inflation plus nearly 4% – meaning some services are increasing monthly bills by 17.3%.
Overnight outage
The problem did not affect Virgin’s television service.
The outage began overnight on 4 April according to Downdetector, with 14,000 people reporting problems at 02:00 BST (00:01 GMT).
By 08:00, just under 26,000 people told the website they could not access their broadband.
But by the afternoon the number of reports had decreased. The actual number of people who were affected by the outage is unclear, because users must have an additional way to access the internet – such as a mobile device with 4G – in order to report the problem.
Virgin’s website was also inaccessible at 08:00, meaning customers could not use its status checker, which advises users on the connectivity status of their broadband, television and phone line – but by 10:00 this had been resolved.
Source – BBC News
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