Virgin, Netflix hit by outages
April 28, 2020
By Colin Mann
UK multiplay operator Virgin Media suffered a major network failure on the evening of April 27th. Intermittent outages began just after 17:00 UK time, leading many frustrated users to take to social media to vent their displeasure.
The Downdetector service recorded more than 30,000 reports, with some suggesting that service resumed quickly but others reported ongoing issues hours later.
A message on Virgin Media’s Outage webpage said: “Cause of outage: We’re currently investigating an intermittent broadband issue that started earlier this evening. This issue is seeing broadband connectivity interrupted for a very short period of time before being restored.”
An update at 08.20 on the morning of April 28th said: “The issue was fixed in the early hours of this morning and it was not caused by a spike in usage or a lack of network capacity. We know how frustrating this was for everyone and we’re really sorry for the disruption caused.” Separately, reports emerged during the evening of April 27th that Netflix had gone down, with users seeing only a message that “something went wrong”.
The problem seems to have only affected the website version of the SVoD service, and only for those users in the Europe.
Other error messages brought up ‘NSES-504’, which Netflix’s website indicates is used for connection issues.
Netflix’s official customer service account asked users to refresh their browsers, and suggested that doing so could force the site to start working again.