Virgin Media network downed by scouse power outage Power problems in Knowsley near Liverpool downed Virgin Media's cable network in the north and midlands today, leaving customers without broadband or TV for several hours. The problems began at about 11.30am. Power was restored around 1pm, a Virgin Media spokesman said, and engineers are still investigating the specific cause …
My TV and Broadband went off on Sunday - I called an engineer yesterday when it still hadn't returned - it turns out one of me neighbours had been fiddling with cables outside and stole my TV and internet! My internet was literally stolen from me! At least now I have it back.
Bloody pirates
You do know that Virgin migrated a number of adsl customers at the weekend - and a number (including me) have been without broadband since due to an authentication problem.
And it seems like they have no idea when this will be sorted. Probably a more significant story than a short power outage?
anyway, wouldn't it be fibre? Maybe not as valuable as copper I grant you.
Virgin need to really sort out their 'DR' - I recall that they've had previous power issues at Liverpool this year. Seems like a cowboy operation these days. I remember when they were Telewest and they were the best ISP in the country by far. How times have changed...:(.
Then how come the direct dial 150/151 numbers were all giving 'number unobtainable' tones yesterday?
And of course when I did finally get through all their systems were still down and therefore unable to help me with the fact that my connection has been droppping out about every 2-7 minutes for the past month......apparently due to them upgrading me to 10Mb, but my 90s vintage modem was incapable of handling it.....although of course that was discovered by myself rather than them telling me anything useful.....
The replacement they said would be here last Friday still isn't, so I solved the situation myself by using a mate's old Motorola Surfboard 4100 and hacking it's MAC address to be the same as the one allocated to me. Et voila - no dropouts for about 20 hours!
I realise this is nothing whatsoever to do with the story, but I've been wanting to vent spleen for yonks and very few people I know have the first idea......let alone what a MAC address is.....
"What do you need and address for, I just leave mine on the peg".....etc....
The article doesn't get the full story: Virgin's email has been broken for 24 hours. This SNAFU cost me a business deal, because documents didn't arrive in time ... and for the last 24 hours, virgin's fault line has consistently told me a pile of porkies about the status of a fix. The tickets on their status page are misleading and rarely updated, and this morning one of their staff had the cheek t tell me that their email is a "free service". Rubbish -- it's advertised as part of a package for which I pay them, and if I'm late paying my bill it's cut off.
I'm moving my email to a separate provider who has proven clue in keeping their systems running, but in the meantime I'm using gmail. Why can google provide a more reliable free service than virgin can when I pay them? And why are the likes of Ofcom so lax in ensuring that ISPs publish honest and timely tickets to confirm the status of any SNAFUs in their services?
Seems to of affected their INTERNAL network too. I called yesterday and was told "The I.T. system has been down for the past 5 hours so we are unable to access any customer account details. Try again later this afternoon." So why did you ask for my account number you nob?!
Interestingly though, when I asked for disconnections (after another call half an hour later and was asked again for my acount number and then as soon as I mentioned the words "incorrectly billed" again I was again told the acount details are down, try again tomorrow!) I found that the disconnections I.T. system "has just come back up" and he was able to help me. convenient that. That said the chap I got was very helpful and did a grand job. Shame it took disconnections to get the service.
Funny thing is, the whole point of the Internet originally was that communications traffic can be dynamically re-routed should any point in between the sender and recipient get nuked...
Still, the way of the www is bigger, better, faster, more... redundancy, reliability and security are all like, so 1970's man.
Oh, and I was at work while VM was down so didn't even notice (this time)... seems they've finished the 4Mb -> 10Mb upgrade now but there have been a few wobbles along the way.
i use virgin media's XL cable system, and am based in London
there was a problem on tuesday, which caused all blueyonder mail to suddenly stop even tho i could still use the browser and email app to collect other mail
the mail from then has been coming in pulses, and is still arriving
it seems rather coincidental that there is suddenly a blackout that has caused a problem up north
could there be something else going on??
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