Virgin Media suffers another outage amid rumours of O2 merger

Virgin Media customers around the country are continuing to report issues affecting their broadband connections.

Last week the network provider suffered a crash that it insists was fixed. But even now, days after the initial issue, many people are struggling to get online.

The website Downdetector, which measures outages on popular services, is showing an influx of disgruntled Virgin customers today, Monday May 4. The website has placed Virgin Media in the top spot for its ‘weekly outage top 10’ chart – putting it ahead of Sky which sits in third place.

The site is tracking over 200 reports of problems affecting Virgin’s network with many complaining it is hampering their ability to work from home.

‘Still happening,’ wrote user @zondajag on Downdetector.

‘I can’t work and your website isn’t allowing me to report the issue. I have reset my modem already.

‘Having a 350M broadband package is useless when it drops out every 5 minutes. My Vodafone 4G wireless is more reliable than a wired Virgin media connection!’

Other users have reported problems on Twitter.

A Virgin Media spokesperson told Metro.co.uk: ‘Our broadband services are running as normal – there is no widespread issue with our network.

‘If customers are experiencing individual connectivity issues they can contact our customer service team for assistance.’

While endeavouring to keep Britain online, it also appears that Virgin Media is in talks to merge with O2. Spanish company Telefonica, which owns O2, has confirmed it is holding talks with Liberty Global, which owns Virgin Media.

Negotiations are apparently ongoing without any guarantee of a deal but if a merger took place it would create a huge rival for BT, which owns EE – the UK’s second-largest mobile network.

O2 is currently the largest phone network with 34 million users, spread out across O2, Tesco Mobile, Giffgaff and Sky Mobile – which piggyback on the network. Virgin, meanwhile, has six million cable and TV customers and around three million mobile users.

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