Virgin Media users across the UK are reporting problems with internet access.
The DownDetector website showed thousands of reports of outages starting just after 1am on Tuesday morning, with a surge of reports from about 6:30am as users tried to log on in the morning.
Users of Twitter posted that they were unable to access the internet via their Virgin connections.
Reports are fairly widespread in the largest cities, where most of the customers for its fibre optic broadband are concentrated.
Virgin Media has confirmed that there is an “issue that is affecting broadband services”.
Contact centres are also affected, it said in a statement on Twitter. It has not so far given any indication of the scale of the problem.
As of 8:30am BST, the Virgin Media website is back up, although in greatly reduced form, while some users are reporting being able to reconnect to the internet following a reboot of their router or modem.
Others still have reported that the internet outage could be circumvented by connecting through a virtual private network (VPN), giving a hint of where the wider problems lie, and suggesting that Virgin Media’s outage, like that at Facebook in 2021, may have been the result of a flaw in the deep-level routing systems that allow internet services to connect to each other.