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I was using VM all Saturday, for both VPN into work and straight to the web for other stuff.

No problems at all with service. I reckon rival ADSL providers spread this story and what really happened is that somebody in London (a VM customer) had a cheap TPLink router in their house, and had to reboot it because it got its knickers in a twist. Told their neighbour who works for rival and they turned it out as a nationwide outage.