Virgin Media Outage Caused by a Cooling Fault

It appears that last nights Nation Wide Virgin Media Outage was caused by some faulty cooling in one of their main backbone racks.

This was explained in a recent resolution email I’ve received:

“Master Update: On Tuesday evening (17th January), Virgin Media Business experienced a network outage that impacted customers using IPVPN, Managed Internet, National Ethernet and broadband services. The problem was quickly traced to a failed cooling unit that had caused a core backbone router to overheat. Due to exceptional circumstances, other backup equipment also failed to activate properly. We’re are now working through a thorough investigation as to why this happened.

Engineers resolved the fault in about an hour. Virgin Media Business would like to apologise to all customers impacted by this outage.

If you have any queries regarding this update – please contact Technical Support.”

The issue was resolved mostly later in the evening on Tuesday but additional load issues due to having to bypass the problem was still causing issues for some people.

Hopefully Virgin will be able to identify why their contingency plan didn’t work.