Hundreds of furious customers are left with no internet for days as Virgin Media goes down

Furious Virgin Media customers have branded the service ‘appalling’ after fibre optic cables were pulled out of the ground leaving them without internet for three days.   

Hundreds of people in south-west London have been affected by the cable being accidentally cut in the New Malden area of south-west London.

In response to messages on social media, the firm said it was repairing the damage and apologised to customers.

An update on the service status page of the company’s website said engineers were on-site fixing the issue.

In a statement, the broadband provider said: ‘A third-party has accidentally cut through a fibre optic cable causing a loss of service for residential and business customers in New Malden and surrounding areas including Surbiton, Wimbledon and Kingston.

‘Our teams have been working throughout the night and this morning to repair the significant damage caused to cables in New Malden.

‘We appreciate how frustrating it is to be without our services for this length of time, so we want to explain why it’s not fixed yet.

The Virgin Media outage map on the DownDetector website showing Kingston upon Thames and Wimbledon as the worst affected areas 

Virgin Media said problems for people in south-west London had been caused by a cable being accidentally cut in the New Malden area

‘During construction work carried out by a third party, a significant number of cables were pulled out of the ground at a building site severing thousands of fibres. This has required a team of engineers working flat out to repair each fibre individually – a painstaking job which has seen our engineers work through the night in difficult conditions.’ 

‘We are working on this as a top priority and hope to have services back up and running as quickly as possible.’

Furious customers took to Twitter to share their frustration after claiming their internet had been cut off since Wednesday.   

Stig Abell commented: ‘The service from Virgin Media is utterly appalling: no internet or TV since Wednesday, various promises broken, now saying Monday morning. 

‘They know hardly anyone will switch, so they don’t care. A complete travesty of a company.’ 

Customers were left furious after claiming they had not had internet connection since Wednesday

The message on the company’s website estimated a fix would be in place by 4pm on Friday.

It warned TV and phone services could also have been impacted by the incident.

According to monitoring service DownDetector, the issue first began being reported on Thursday morning, with many saying their businesses had been affected by the outage.

Steve Gray commented on the Virgin Media thread on DownDetector after speaking with engineers on the New Malden site.   

He said: ‘I was in New Malden today on a business park where Virgin Media have their local servers. Several engineers were digging holes and pulling big cables. 

Steve Gray commented on the Virgin Media thread on DownDetector after speaking with engineers on the New Malden site

‘The engineers were telling me that a large foundation drilling machine on an adjacent property drilled into a duct containing the fiber optic cables causing the problem.

‘The machine then wrapped the cables around its self and started ripping them out of the duct right back to the exchange. The guys were trying to slack off the tightened and ripped cables.

‘Kingston hospital was taken offline and their priority had been to reconnect it (now done).’

‘I said that the Virgin site states the issue will be fixed by 4pm Friday and they laughed – apparently it will take them days to install new cables and make the intricate connections to each fibre optic strand.

‘They said they were likely to have it all working again on Monday!’