Local outage is leaving me without Internet for over 3 weeks

TL;DR: My internet died after a local outage. Virgin Media sent an engineer who couldn't fix it. What followed was a week of chaos: being hung up on twice, promised callbacks that never happened, and engineers who were booked and then mysteriously cancelled. I was told four different stories by four different people, including that my one-year-old cables were "too old" and needed a rewire, with the next appointment being 2.5 weeks away. After threatening to release call recordings, I was finally put through to an "Executive" who has promised to sort it, but I'm not holding my breath.

Right, where to begin? Before I get into the nitty-gritty of this whole saga, I want to make one thing clear: I have call recordings of most of the conversations I’m about to describe, just to prove I’m not making any of this up.

I’m what you’d call a simple customer. I’m on Virgin’s M500 plan, just for the internet. That’s it. And for a while, it was fine. The issues kicked off on Thursday, 12th of June, when I got a text saying there was an outage in my area. Fair enough, these things happen. The internet was a bit patchy for the next few days, dropping in and out, but it mostly worked.

Then came Sunday night. At around 9 pm, the internet decided to pack it in completely. The hub was just sitting there, its usual white light being interrupted by a flashing red one every few seconds. A sign of things to come, I suppose.

Come Monday morning at 8 am, I was on the phone. "What's going on?" I asked. I was told the area fault was still active and it should be all sorted by 6 pm. And to be fair, I got a text at 2:10 pm saying the issue was resolved. Great news, you might think. Except for the small fact that I still had no internet.

So, I called them back and, after a bit of back and forth, insisted they send someone out. An engineer arrived later that day. He checked things inside, then had a look outside and delivered the verdict: no signal was coming into the house from the street cabinet. He said it was a job for a specialist team, not him. He texted his manager and supposedly arranged for the right person to come the next day, Tuesday. Since I wouldn't be in, I confirmed with him that all the work was outside and they wouldn't need access. He assured me that was the case. Just to be safe, I rang customer service to double-check. They confirmed it too.

On Tuesday, around 2 pm, my phone rings. It's someone from Virgin. "Good news, the engineer has been and closed the job. Just restart your router." I told him that was brilliant, but I wouldn't be home until quarter past six and asked if he could give me a call back then. He said he would.

You can guess what happened next. I got home, restarted the router, and… nothing. Still dead. And the callback? Of course, it never came.

So, I called them. Again. I explained the whole story to a lady on the phone, only for her to tell me that their records showed "no one was at the property today". At this point, I got a little bit miffed. I explained that I work from home three days a week and this was becoming a massive problem. And for my troubles? She hung up on me.

I immediately rang back, absolutely fuming, and demanded to speak to a manager. I explained the situation to the new agent, including the fact I'd just been hung up on. He started the transfer, which put me on hold for a good ten minutes. I finally heard a "Hello?" and then… click. They’d hung up on me again.

Forty minutes into my next call, I finally spoke to a representative named "Waye" (I've no idea how to spell it). To her credit, she was lovely. She said all the right things, promised me compensation equal to my monthly bill, and even gave me a complaint reference number. She said she'd booked an engineer for the next day, Wednesday. Then she asked, "As you're happy with that, can I close the complaint?" I told her, in no uncertain terms, that nothing was being closed until my internet was back on.

Wednesday, 11:30 am. I called to check what time the engineer was due. The response? "I'm sorry, sir, but there is no engineer scheduled for today."

The conversation that followed lasted nearly an hour, with the bloke on the other end changing his story more times than I've had hot dinners. First, he could get someone out for Thursday. Then, a minute later, he said the engineer from Tuesday had closed the job because it needed a "Network Management team," who were, apparently, working on it "as we speak." He then offered to book a "backup" engineer for Friday. Note how Thursday was suddenly off the table. I asked him if the Friday engineer was the same type of technician as the one on Monday who couldn't fix it. His reply was a wonderfully vague, "The engineer will come and do his job." Utterly useless.

A few hours later, I decided to try for a manager again. I got through to a manager named Shirli. She was very nice, very apologetic, and said all the things I wanted to hear. She even managed to arrange an engineer for that same afternoon, between 12 pm and 4 pm. Given that my call with her was at 2 pm, I wasn't sure if she'd invented a time machine, but I was willing to hope.

Of course, the engineer never turned up.

At 5 pm, I was back on the phone. I asked for Shirli but was told they have no direct lines to managers. The new agent looked into why the 12-4 pm engineer was a no-show. Her findings were astonishing. The appointment had been scheduled, but was "immediately cancelled and rescheduled by the system." Why? Because the wiring to my property needed a full rewire as it was "too old." This is utterly impossible – the entire village I live in was only cabled by Virgin less than a year ago.

I asked her when the system had rescheduled this phantom rewire for. She then had to manually check for the next available slot, proving the "automatic reschedule" was a lie. Had I not called, I'd have been left waiting for no one.

"The next available appointment for a rewire," she said, "is the 3rd of July." Two and a half weeks away.

I asked for a manager.

This time, I got Soel. The pleasantries were over. He was blunt, and kept repeating that while the cable to my house was new, the underground cables down the road were old. This is also false, for the same reason as before. He stated there was nothing he could do about the two-and-a-half-week wait and that I was "welcome to cancel," and he would waive the fee. In a moment of sheer exasperation, I agreed. But then, I thought better of it. I told him to stop the cancellation and that I would be posting my call recordings online to show the world the level of incompetence and lack of care at Virgin Media.

His tone changed. He said if that was my intention, he would connect me to the Executive Team, who might issue me with a Deadlock Letter so I could go to the Ombudsman.

Finally, I was transferred to Akhil. He was, thankfully, one of the nicer ones again. I recounted the entire, sorry tale one last time. He listened patiently and said he would use his "executive powers" to push my rewire forward and that it wouldn't be two and a half weeks away. He promised he had put in a request and would call me back tomorrow.

So here I am, waiting for that promised call from Akhil. As you can probably guess, I’m not holding my breath. I'm now deciding on the best way to get this full story, along with the call recordings, out to the public. I've already contacted a few newsletters about it, in the hope that one of them fancies picking up a story about just how farcical this entire process has been. We'll see if a bit of public light is the only thing that can get a simple internet connection fixed.