Forum Discussion

klomas's avatar
klomas
Tuning in
31 days ago

Compensation for loss of services

Hello!

I've had an outage since Tuesday afternoon. The time for the fix keeps getting pushed by an hour until eventually the next day (now saying it'll be fixed tomorrow by 9am, but I expect it'll get pushed again last minute). I work from home so this isn't ideal.

How long of disrupted services before compensation is offered? I ask as I got a message on Wednesday saying it was fixed (it wasn't), immediately followed by another message saying the fix was delayed again. Now, when I check on my account, it doesn't have the message saying I've registered for compensation.

It feels like the message saying it was fixed was to avoid compensation. I had the same thing happen a couple years ago where I never got compensation, even after raising it, when I didn't have Internet for several days.

If I'm not paid compensation again this time, is there anything else I'd need to do before raising it with the ombudsman?

Thanks for your help

4 Replies

  • japitts's avatar
    japitts
    Very Insightful Person
    31 days ago

    As long as you've registered your loss-of-service, then the updates given by the status tool are subsequently irrelevant providing you meet the criteria on https://www.virginmedia.com/help/billing-and-payments/automatic-compensation

    Only broadband & landline telephony are covered, and there's a 2working day period from the outage. My understanding is that if you registered LOS on Tuesday, then Wednesday & Thursday count as grace, and the £9.98 per day will start registering on Friday unless the fault is rectified before 23:59 on Friday PM - in which case nothing is payable.

    Ofcom don't consider individual customer complaints except for statistical purposes, but VM do have a formal complaints process which allows for referral to external arbitration after 8weeks.

  • goslow's avatar
    goslow
    Alessandro Volta
    31 days ago

    VM has 30 days from when your service was reinstated to credit you with any compo due.

    The most important thing is to log the issue with VM as a 'total loss of service' and to re-state that you still have a TLS if VM is claiming a fix has been implemented. Best way to do this is to phone in.

    VM's track record is somewhat 'patchy', in the topics on here, when it comes to paying the correct compo so make sure you keep detailed notes of everything to ensure you get the correct amount due if you qualify

  • Carley_S's avatar
    Carley_S
    Icon for Forum Team rankForum Team
    29 days ago

    Hi klomas.

    Welcome back to the Community Forums. 
    We do apologise that you're currently impacted by an area outage and that the estimated fix time has been pushed back. We can assure you that it's not the level of service we aim to provide.
    Whilst we do our best to keep any faults and downtime to an absolute minimum, unfortunately, sometimes service issues do happen from time to time. We'll always aim to have you back up and running ASAP, but, in some instances, this can take longer than we'd like.
    You can read about our auto compensation scheme here. 
    Checking the systems on our side, the estimated fix time is currently 22 October 2025, at 2pm. You might find that your Virgin Fibre, Voice and Virgin TV services are intermittent, with the picture freezing or disappearing now and then. We are sorry, and our engineers are working to resolve this as soon as possible. 
    Please let us know if you are having any further issues or have any questions at all. We'll be here to help on the Community Forums if needed.

    • klomas's avatar
      klomas
      Tuning in
      25 days ago

      Hi @Carley_S

      I spoke to someone from Virgin on the WhatsApp contact number on the 17th who said "I can assure you that this work will be completed and outage gets sorted before 22nd Oct without miss, after which you can use the services without any interruptions".

      The fix was for 14:10 today (22nd Oct) and has now been pushed back (again!) until the 27th October. I can't trust that it'll be fixed on this date again. What exactly is the issue that's making it taking so long?