According to the newsgroups it seemed to take 3 hours to recognise the fault, another 2 hours for it to escalate to the status page and another 3 or so hours to actually fix it.

Quite slow for such a large ISP to get into action when many routes simply go missing.

That's news to me.

Had no issues at all with my VM broadband.

I didn't have any problems yesterday, though I don't play WoW or use any 1and 1 services :P

I've seen routing issues in the past though... even identified the problem via a few traceroutes from my own and my neighbours Virgin Media net connections and reported to Virgin tech support... after being transferred around various departments the monkey didn't even know what a traceroute was and denied all knowledge of the problem!

On top of that, I haven't had a landline for 3-4 months... they were due to send an engineer who arrived BEFORE the agreed time before leaving. Further phone calls resulted in idiots with severely lacking english skills who are clearly reading from a script.

Might try again this weekend but I'll be damned if I'm plugging yet another handset into my line, booking ANOTHER engineer, taking ANOTHER day off work without pay, and having an engineer not turn up or post the "You aren't in" note and leg it without even knocking. Virgin Media's cable internet is great.. everything else is a complete farce in my experience.

Just ask HMRC!

....from a company that can't even handle it's own billing properly - They cut me off when they refused to accept a direct debit payment - then started arguing that I was on a higher tariff that I'd signed up for (I've got the £20/month for tv & broadband - they've started arguing that the offer I was sold in fact costs over £35/ month, despite what's written in the contract).

Unsuprisingly, I told them to stick it where the sun doesn't shine - which I had to clarify for the 'english is barely my third language, let alone my first' rep on the phone.

Even when I did get service, there were constant outages for 2 or more hours, connections dropped after a couple of minutes (bloody useful when downloading!), and the 'technical' staff didn't even know where to find a MAC or IP address in XP!

They're just a shambles of a company that took over another shambles of a company using a brand name they bought in the hope it would inspire customer connfidence.

/end rant

It affected more than Root Servers. Sites on shared hosting packages were hit too; I suspect it was basically everything, given that being in Germany appears to have been the problem. But I guess when the problem lay elsewhere, 1&1 could only really base their statement on the profile of the support calls they got, and I'd imagine those spending £600+ a year are quite understandably the shoutiest!

When do they get put in the same sentence?? Except to add Piss poor.

Only way to get them to do anything is to threaten the court route (small claims is good for this).... amazing how quickly they can get things sorted then... went from 2-3 weeks IF we can be arsed to 2 hours MAX. And they turned up and replaced the faulty equipment.

aren't fasthosts only sending out passwords to users who didn't change them themselves, as advised, following the security breach weeks ago?

When is anyone going to post a story about the traffic management changes they made to their (terrible) ADSL network last Friday, that has broken online gaming/VoIP/etc ever since?

Not like it was good prior to then. I mean, tell me a gamer that wants latency of 280ms to UK servers.

Checkout my 24/7 monitoring if you don't believe me:

http://bazza.dyndns.org/rrdstats/baz14all.cgi?p=1d

Try clicking on 'Year' and see if you can guess when I joined their service?

More on the traffic management:

http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/showthreaded.php?Cat=&Board=virgin_adsl&Number=3198432&page=0&view=expanded&sb=5&o=7#Post3198432

...since they took over Blueyonder. All their services have turned to crap. Lost Sky TV channels. Broadband bandwidth throttling sucks. Even want to charge you to report broadband faults that are clearly their fault. Steer clear would be my advice.

When I joined Virgin.net on ADSL 3 years ago, the service was good and the product reliable. In the last 6 months I have suffered outages, reduced performance and deplorable customer service.

The latest is that I am required to prove that my boradband is not meeting the service level by using speedtester.bt.com, which itself does not reliably work and which consistently fails for me as it cannot verify the domain I am connecting from. VM wont accept that my ADSL is failing unless I do speedtests on this service which I cant because it causes an error each time. Catch-22.

The off shore call centre at 25p/minute does not help either, referring me to their online "chat" support which does not work on my Mac.

Web sites, mail, etc., were all affected.

Heck, you couldn't even get to www.1&1.co.uk.

Coincidentally, I have come across two other network outages that were happening at the same time as this yesterday - at least one bank branch lost all connectivity, and an electricity company where there were power cuts that were blamed by the company on the loss of control signals that were carried over the internet.

Took these clowns 3 weeks to find an cure a routing error on their network, despite 3 calls a day, and repeated emails to their support and even their NOC...

My service has inexplicable drops, I went for the premium service of 20MB and rarely get above 7mb. Calls to them are slow to be answered usually punted around a number of people and then they force you to shut down your pc start it in safe mode and if the speed is remotely close, no problem. That clearly is not how a pc is used in every day use. But I have given up arguing the point, especially now its 25p per minute. I would suggest anyone considering Virgin to forget it.

Ditching access to World of Warcraft should be considered a public service, as it might have forced all the pasty anti-social WoW addicts to leave their dim hovels and engage with the real world...

Who am I kidding, they've probably got a whole series of Star Trek sat on their hard-disk for just such an occasion.