Virgin Media broadband is down AGAIN

Virgin Media appears to be suffering another broadband outage, leaving thousands of users across the country without internet. 

Reported issues are across the UK, with a high concentration in the midlands and London. 

According to outage tracker site DownDetector, the issues started around 10:18am BST.  

More than three-quarters of all reported problems with Virgin are with its cable internet. 

A minority of users were also struggling with mobile internet and TV issues, but it is unclear if these were related. 

Virgin Media is one of the most popular broadband providers in the UK.  

Unlike many others, it has its own infrastructure and does not use the Openreach network. 

Virgin customers are unfortunately accustomed to such issues, with the provider being beleaguered by crashes throughout the coronavirus pandemic. 

In July, Virgin confirmed an outage which it claimed was local only to Nottingham. 

A couple of weeks beforehand a similar outage hit London, leaving people unplugged for several hours. 

MailOnline has approached Virgin media for comment.  

Users took to Twitter to vent their frustration at the internet provider. 

One user said: ‘Virgin media making working from home near impossible.’

Another added: ‘Virgin Media your internet is shocking, going down every week which makes working from home so difficult.’

Recent research shows millions of people – about 25 per cent of the UK’s working adults – are still working exclusively from home as a result of coronavirus and are relying on a good internet connection. 

A study by Uswitch.com found that, over the last year, the average UK household has spent 29 hours offline due to outages. 

Nearly five million people have suffered a single broadband outage that lasted three hours or more. 

It is unknown what the cause of the current outage and how widespread it is. 

Last month, rival network Openreach was struck down as a small fire in a building in Newcastle which damaged the cables carrying internet to the region.

However, an outage can be caused by various glitches or flaws which manifest themselves as a drop in service. 

It is unlikely the issue is due to a large volume of traffic, as the broadband network has cope well with increased demand throughout lockdown. 

Virgin Media, for example, reported at the start of this month that  the latest Call of Duty: Warzone update caused a 60 per cent spike in traffic on Wednesday 5 August. 

Overall, an additional 22 Petabytes of data was downloaded compared to the previous week. 

At the peak of recorded traffic, the equivalent of more than 52 PS4 Warzone patches worth of data was downloaded each second.