In the U.K., Virgin Media has been having some issues with technology downtime and this has impacted on households and businesses seeking to access certain services. In particular, Virgin’s issues have left several businesses and individuals without Internet across the UK, sometimes for as many as five days without resolution.
Some customers have struggled to work from home, while businesses in Lancashire reportedly ended up shutting their doors because they couldn’t perform basic business functions such as take payments with the cash tills.
Virgin is a brand name, used for a number of services. For telecoms, the company is owned by Liberty Global and Telefónica.
Later in October, it has been reported that further outages have occurred, with nearly a third of customers reporting a total service blackout and Virgin Media’s Twitter feed is full of comments from angry customers who in 2022 aren’t willing to put up with intermittent connectivity.
Jon Lucas, co-founder and director of Hyve Managed Hosting tells Digital Journal why this matters: “As one of the top telecoms companies in the U.K., millions of U.K. customers rely on the broadband, mobile, TV and home phone services provided by Virgin Media. These customers – many of whom rely on these services to work from home – are extremely frustrated about not being able to access the resources they’re paying for. In an age where remote working has become the norm, a good WiFi connection is essential, and customers aren’t willing to compromise on having one.”
Lucas says that the consequences of the issue may lead to a loss of custom, either short-term or in the longer-term: “An outage – however long it lasts – can be enough in itself to convince customers to switch to a competitor. Meanwhile Virgin Media’s services have been down for hours – with some customers suffering issues since yesterday.”
Many forms of work will be impacted due to the greater reliance upon home working, says Lucas, noting: “Although the shift to working from home might have led to a more flexible mindset, such long outages are affecting home workers’ livelihoods; they can’t afford for an outage to last minutes, let alone hours.”
Lucas adds that technology firms need to improve their response times. With this current case: “Therefore, although unplanned downtime can’t usually be anticipated, when it does occur, the reaction and time to recovery is crucial. The longer downtime persists, the more the effects on reputation and customer loyalty are exacerbated rather than mitigated. Telecoms companies need to make sure their infrastructure, as the very backbone of their businesses, is up to scratch, with the right contingency plans and technology in place for effective disaster recovery, should the worst happen.”
