Outages batter UK's Virgin Media into wee hours as broadband failures spike 77% globally Broadband outages have soared since the start of the COVID-19 lockdown, per data from US network intelligence firm ThousandEyes. Among the most recent victims is Virgin Media, which suffered intermittent failures across the UK and Ireland starting yesterday early evening, and continuing into the early hours of the morning. The …
Yeah, most things point to the core network. I didn't see loss of connectivity to CMTS and even traceroutes worked, kind of, but extremely slowly. Needless to say any actual traffic, name look ups, estabilished connections etc timed out.
Amusingly, this time VM's outage page didn't lie that everything is ok, but was also broken.
I don't hold out much hope that VM/LG ever tell the truth, but it would be nice to hear what actually happened just out of professional interest.
It also started out earlier than the article started. I'm on VM and ours fell over at 2pm. A bunch of our neighbors had the same problem, but interestingly not everyone on the street suffered (at least one maintained connection). At the time, downdetector was starting to spike. Lucky for us we got restored around 3pm, but continued to have intermittent problems that evening, possibly even today. Also interestingly, the call centre mentioned that they were doing some work on some core equipment but we shouldn't have been affected - perhaps that was blowing smoke, though. We did at least get escalated to an "area issue"...
" I'm on VM and ours fell over at 2pm. "
I've seen local reports of problems as early as lunchtime
Some of the patterns I've seen have an eerily familiar curve that matches what I used to see on a university LAN with over 1400 hosts in one segment....
Like Talk talk, VM is cheap, you get what you pay for
i'd rather not be with VM but £27 for 200/20mbs was too good to pass on.
50mbs down is more than i need but i'd like more up, 20 is comparable to fttc so i'm stuck with vm until i can get a better deal elsewhere.
Interestingly i frequently get 30mbs plus upload on Three's 4G. I am very tempted by the 5G offering.
Personally, I'm very happy with the 37/10 (consistent measured speeds) I get from FTTC for £25/mo. And I use it all day for work and much of the evening for streaming. It's been rock solid for a year now. After past experiences, I'd have to be paying significantly less for VM's 200/20 to go with them again. There's a lot of value in knowing that I get exactly what I'm paying for every hour of the day (and no "traffic shaping" either).
me thinks as my modem, and router never lost signal once
So more than likely the single switch in the back of a Brentford cupboard that serves the entire VM network gave up the ghost.
But I think all VM did in the end was turn it all off and on again as my TV box somehow went out of standby into usual play mode over night....
And as the previous punter said 120 meg down/10 meg up is more than enough and been far better and more reliable than anything based on openretches technology
Icon... for all those missing the videos....
To be fair, OR's FTTP seems so far to be pretty reliable.
Had only the one episode of huge packet losses (like 50%) which both myself and the ISP couldn't explain.
Different routers, direct PPPoE connections, nothing made a difference. All diags OK at the ISP end.
Turns out a hard reset and factory default on the Huawei ONT sorted it all out. I suspect they may be a little crappier than I would like and I wish OR would allow me to use my own (not sure if ONT configurations are a Industry Standard thing or not?)
At least now I know it's a thing...
For me only issue I had was internet and phone disappeared, there was this shadow down the road of someone in a picker. Went outside and found it was BT replacing the wooden poles to the houses down the street, we received a letter a few days before but it looked like spam so was binned.
For one reason or another, I found myself working at the weekend, and using (Well, trying to) BT's nationwide-ish Wi-Fi network with an SSID of "BTWifi-with-FON" (Yes, I know, but needs must on occasion. And yes, I was using the office VPN service to work).
Now, I normally run a 'split-tunnel' to work, mainly to avoid hogging work's bandwidth un-necessarily but in this case I had to go to 'full tunnel'....and why was that?
Every single Google service (Google search, youtube/ytimg, fonts.googleapis, you name it etc. ad nausium) appeared to be 'silent' on that connection, almost as if they were 'blackholed'.. Even moving to another router/BSS didn't help. So I did a bit of digging. DNS was fine - hosts resolved correctly in all cases it seems and traceroute looked sensible - but TCP to those hosts just vanished into the often-mentioned cyberspace. Its almost as if someone had pulled the plug on google's entire AS and suite of hosted services.'Talking' to anything else was fine...but if involved a google service talking to my endpoint(s), then things just didn't work.
Switching to a full tunnel, or hot-spotting to my mobile (Awful signal, hence the dreaded BT/FON thing) sorted it out - thank $DEITY. It's an unpleasant experience surfing when google services are unavailable.....some would say not much better when they are :-)
Gave up trying to figure it out once I remembered how much NAT/CG-NAT/Firewall/Routing BS was going on. I'm told this is not an infrequent occurrence for BT Wifi users..
This problem lasted all weekend, but was magically fixed when I got home from the office on Monday.
If anyone has the inside gen. on this, I'd love to know what the cock-up or failure was. I had hoped from better from BT, however I'm not surprised - nobody gives a shit these days ::-)
Ooops, forgot to mention peering :-)
I've been out of the IP-routing dicipline for a while now and can no longer keep track of who peers with who, or who routes via who.....let alone who hosts their endpoints in who's CDN / on who's service :-)
God, I miss my own looking glass and accurate whois.
an explanation on what happened with "AS6830 Liberty Global B.V."
AS6830 Liberty Global B.V is one of the major Tier 1 peers on the internet. Tier 1 providers route data to other peers and backbone services (such as CDN's Level 1, Akimi, and incapsula).
AT around 5pm last night tier-1 peer AS6830 started experiencing packet loss issues so routed traffic via other tier 1 providers (A list of tier 1 providers is here: which resulted in congestion due to the extra load which AS6830 should have been handling which is why the outage affected other services/isp's and not just virgin media.
why did this affect google services?
Since google uses Akamai as their cdn provider (cdn's cache and distribute content across the internet) when AS6830 experienced issues youtube (and other google services) experienced connection issues the same as other providers.
In total AS6830 has 934 major peers which would have experienced connection issues you can see a full list of peers here: https://bgp.tools/as/6830#connectivity if you are interested.
why were virgin customers most affected?
since Liberty global is the parent company of virgin and the operator of the AS6830 most of virgin media's traffic is routed via AS6830 which resulted in a greater number of customers experiencing slow connections.
I have the 1Gbit service. I forgot how bad Virgin are.. for gaming the latency can sometimes be terrible and their official support appears to be forums which are not really serviced - I have a formal complaint letter for issues not being resolved for 8 weeks so I can nail them to the post.
Anyway, here is the BQM graph of yesterday:
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality/share/5dc6f77555e9f71c0a68ebd078dd25b36e34d9e5-27-04-2020
and the small hours of Tuesday:
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality/share/8ff331b5d5714ac3771aa1a19d3af028112c9025-29-04-2020
The only thing that shut up their poor latency was doing something to the connection whereby a stayalive is regulary affected. The download rate was 1GB early on in October - but nothing like that now. Trash really.
ICMP (as it's spelt by anyone who knows about networking) is perfectly fine in this case, where thinkbroadband is pinging you / your home router and graphing what it sees.
I suspect you're confusing it with those who ping their ISP's infrastructure and moan about the jitter and loss - different thing entirely.
My Virgin, broadband, tv and phone, all went down Monday evening but was back up by the time I rebooted.
I’m still very happy with their service. If someone else could provide 500Mb service I’d probably look at them, as it is, I’ll stick with Virgin. They have provided an excellent service, despite the increase in usage, the vast majority of the time.
I'm also paying for 500Mb "Business" service, but I seldom get much more than 200Mb. According to Virgin, that's becasue I have a multi-static IP, and if I could measure and aggregate all 5 IPs simultaneously then I would get my 500Mb.
However, sometimes I get over 500Mb and other times under 200Mb... on 1 IP... even with nothing else physically connected.
I smell BS...
This post has been deleted by its author
COVID has made very little change to my connectivity. On a 100Mb/s nominal service I've never obtained better than 500kb/s and that only in occasional bursts, due to the poor standard of my last half mile over "copper", and over more than a decade BT has never got round to fixing this. The only possibly COVID-related effect is slow DNS resolution and, occasionally, overload of specific sites.
I suppose I should be grateful not to be suffering connectivity problems due to COVID
We have Virgin's 500Mbps mega VOOM service in our main office, and it's famously unreliable. If we can go a week without an outage, I'll call it a win. Luckily the shared building has another WiFi network we can use as a fallback. We're now going to add a BT fibre line as our own secondary link, and sort out some sort of failover. But ironically, given the nightmares that BT have caused us at our remote sites, their network actually seems far more resilient than Virgin's. My BT link at home has had one brief known outage in 2 years, and I've never experienced a slowdown either. It just flies along, day and night, quite happily.
I have no experience of VM (other than the mess they leave after "micro-trenching" everywhere) as they do not come to our village. I am on PlusNet (BT) FTTC and it has been rock solid for years. Speeds are spot on what was predicted (and the limits of what it can deliver).
We are about half a mile from the exchange and 200 yards from the cabinet so that helps. I ditched the Technicalor modem router thingy and use a Fritz Box for the combined router/switch/wifi bit.
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