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Virgin Media goes offline for thousands

Getty Images A Virgin Media technician works on the cabling in a roadside cabinetGetty Images

Virgin Media, one of the UK's largest broadband providers, has gone offline for thousands of users.

Intermittent outages began just after 17:00 BST on Monday, coinciding with the government daily coronavirus press briefing.

The Downdetector service recorded more than 30,000 reports - some said service resumed quickly but others reported ongoing issues hours later.

Virgin said the problem was fixed as of Tuesday morning.

A Virgin Media spokesman told the BBC on Tuesday the issue "saw broadband drop for a minute or so every hour or two and then restore".

"We identified the problem and it's now fixed as of earlier this morning. This wasn't a constant loss of service, it was intermittent," he added. The firm believes the problem was caused "by a technical fault in our core network".

Some users had reported brief outages continuing into the early hours, causing problems for services - such as customer service chats and online video games - which require a persistent connection.

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Virgin Media's website had estimated problems would not be fixed until Tuesday morning for some UK postcodes.

Downdetector indicates that other UK broadband providers - including Sky, BT, TalkTalk and Vodafone - experienced problems for a brief time shortly after midnight, but it is not known whether this was related to Virgin's problem.