Virgin Media customers threaten to walk amid compensation disappointment

Outage was not long enough to trigger automatic refunds

Virgin Media has been hit by a host of frustrated users, complaints and threats to leave after two major outages.

The internet company was forced to apologise twice after outages on Tuesday. Connections went offline at 2am, before being resolved; they then broke again on Tuesday afternoon.

“Unfortunately we have seen a repeat of an earlier issue which is causing intermittent broadband connectivity problems for some Virgin Media customers,” the company said at the time.

“We apologise again to those impacted, our teams are continuing to work flat out to find the root cause of the problem and fix it.”

By Tuesday evening, service was restored to users and the company said it was monitoring for any more issues.

But that outage had already led to a flurry of complaints from users, many of whom suggested they would be leaving for alternative internet providers. Customers complained not only about the break in their internet connections but about frustration with the customer service they had received, too.

However, the issue did not last for long enough for customers to be issued with automatic compensation.

Virgin Media is one of a number of internet companies signed up to Ofcom’s automatic compensation scheme, having joined along with most other major providers in 2019.

That scheme aims to make it easier for people to receive refunds for outages, without them having to chase customer service or explicitly ask for it.

However, it only begins when the internet has stopped working and is not fully fixed after two full working days. There was less than a delay between even the first outage and the conclusion of the second, meaning that the latest problems were a long way from triggering that scheme.

The Ofcom scheme also allows for automatic compensation in cases where an engineer misses an appointment or there is a delay in the start of a new service. Full details can be found on the regulators’ website.

Companies can of course choose to offer refunds or other kinds of compensation whenever they want. But there is no indication that Virgin Media is planning to do so.