Despite Virgin Media‘s statement confirming “there is no national broadband outage,” many customers, including ourselves, have experienced major connectivity issues. Here’s our firsthand account of the incident and what we discovered during the Virgin Media broadband outage.
On the morning of 19th November 2019, Virgin Media made an official statement claiming their broadband services were running smoothly with “no national broadband outage.” However, we and many of our customers strongly disagree.
At Kingfisher Computers, we began our day as usual—checking emails and ensuring our servers were up and running. But today, something was different. Our Virgin Media broadband was down—completely dead. No connection at all. Within minutes, we began receiving calls from distressed customers all reporting the same issue: “My Virgin Media internet isn’t working, but they’re telling me everything is fine.”
As IT technicians, we immediately checked our Virgin Media router, analysing the upstream and downstream status, and found nothing—just a complete 100% outage. We decided to contact Virgin Media directly, only to be told that they were unaware of any issues. But we knew otherwise.
Faced with a full broadband outage, we had to think fast. With no immediate solution from Virgin Media, we turned to our mobile phones for tethering.
While we once had a spare internet line, we had to remove it due to business cutbacks when Hartlepool Borough Council closed Church Street, affecting local businesses. So, we were left using mobile phone tethering to connect to the internet for the entire shop—an unexpected and inefficient workaround for a computer business.
If you’re experiencing similar problems with Virgin Media broadband outages, you can set up a tethered connection using your mobile phone. Here’s how to do it:
Once we were back online using tethering, we continued to receive calls from frustrated customers facing the same issue. Still, Virgin Media denied any widespread outage. Curious about the extent of the problem, we searched Google for “Virgin Media broadband outage”—and the results were overwhelming.
To our surprise, nine different news outlets were reporting a massive Virgin Media broadband outage across the UK. Here are a few headlines from that day:
Despite these reports, Virgin Media’s status page was down, leaving many customers confused and in the dark about what was really happening.
The situation took an unexpected twist when we received a call from one of our regular customers requesting remote support. She was using Virgin Media broadband—yet her connection was working perfectly. And to add to the confusion, she lived only five minutes away from our office. It became clear that the Virgin Media outage wasn’t affecting all customers uniformly, raising more questions about the scale and randomness of the issue.
National broadband outages are rare, and typically, broadband problems are localized. But this incident was unusual. Virgin Media customers across the UK were affected, yet the company was publicly denying the issue.
Why would Virgin Media deny the outage? Could it be connected to rumors of Vodafone’s acquisition of Virgin Media? There has been speculation that Vodafone is looking to expand its presence by buying Virgin Media, and perhaps the company wanted to keep things under wraps.
We’ve been loyal Virgin Media customers for over a decade and have generally received excellent service. Usually, any issues are resolved swiftly. However, the silence and denial surrounding this particular Virgin Media broadband outage were troubling, especially with major news outlets covering the issue.
The ultimate question remains: why did Virgin Media deny the outage when so many customers were clearly affected?
While Virgin Media may have denied a national outage, the customer reality told a different story. Whether this was a rare glitch or a part of larger issues within the company, the event highlighted the importance of having backup internet options.
If you’re a Virgin Media customer and have experienced similar issues, be prepared by learning how to set up mobile tethering or consider keeping a spare internet line as a backup.
For more support or help setting up your backup internet connection, feel free to contact Kingfisher Computers.
