Virgin Media has apologised after services went down overnight, leading to thousands of users reporting issues with their internet into Tuesday morning.
According to website DownDetector, the provider saw a huge spike in customers reporting outages with over 25,000 since just after 1am. Almost 75% of these reports were issued with the internet or landline, while nearly 25% of users complained of a "total blackout".
Many users took to social media to vent their frustrations after struggling to get their WiFi working earlier in the morning. Others complained that they were even unable to access the provider's status checker for an update on the situation, which appeared to have crashed amid the huge influx of reported issues.
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"Is anyone else having problems with Virgin Media this morning?" one person asked on Twitter. "I can't even get on the website to check status!"
Another fumed: "This is absolutely unacceptable. They keep putting the price up, and yet the service keeps getting worse!"
"Love when you've just renewed your contract with Virgin Media despite the price increases, and you're rewarded with all of their services being down including the status checker on their own site," someone else ranted. "So ridiculous."
It comes after Virgin announced significant price hikes for customers as of April 1, with the average bill rising by 13.8% for millions of broadband, TV and home phone customers. Virgin apologised to users on Tuesday morning for the disruption, saying that they were working to fix the problem.
The provider wrote on Twitter: "We're aware of an issue that is affecting broadband services for Virgin Media customers as well as our contact centres. Our teams are currently working to identify and fix the problem as quickly as possible and we apologise to those customers affected."
Virgin confirmed at 11.30am on Tuesday that services have now been restored. A spokesperson said: "We've restored broadband services for customers but are closely monitoring the situation as our engineers continue to investigate. We apologise for any inconvenience caused."
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