Virgin blackout hits customers

Virgin Media customers across the UK lost some or all of phone, broadband and television service for three hours on Tuesday evening due to an unspecified routing fault.

The company has not said how many of its five million customers were affected during the outage, which lasted from 17:00 to around 20:00, but it did apologise in a statement, saying: "Our customers may have experienced some problems getting online yesterday evening. Our engineers quickly fixed the problem and service was restored by 8pm. We apologise for the inconvenience."

Over 1,200 comments were left on Virgin Media's facebook page replying to the company's updates about the problem, many unhappy that this coincided with a promise to double or more than double subscribers' broadband speeds without increasing prices, in a nationwide update scheme due to start in February.

This in itself has had an inauspicious start with the company mistakenly emailing a promise to upgrade customers to 120Mbps service to many who did not qualify, then sending out a correction. The upgrade is due to complete in mid-2013.