Updated: Near-national outage on Virgin's TV service

Virgin Media cable TV customers were left without television service on Thursday night after an outage of nearly national scope hit the cable operator's network.

The alarm was raised on the DS forums just before 21:30, with customers across the UK reporting a loss of most or in some cases all channels.

Posts also reported that Virgin's 150 and 151 customer service lines were "dead" for a period around the time that the outage began.

An hour after the problem started, the following status message was posted on the Virgin Media website:

"Customers in Northern Ireland, Glasgow, Surrey, Huddersfield, Luton, Milton Keynes, Wales, Nottingham, Teesside, Coventry, Oxford and Cambridge may currently be experiencing a loss of their digital TV. Our engineers are now investigating this issue."

Virgin offered an apology "for any inconvenience caused" and said that a fix was expected within four hours.

As the evening progressed, viewers reported that some channels were functioning while others remained mysteriously absent.

One Virgin customer joked: "OK everyone who wants to watch Grey's - round my house at 11 (Living doesn't work, but Living +1 does)."

By Friday morning, all linear TV channels were available again but the Electronic Programme Guide and Virgin's much-vaunted on demand services remained off. A status update from the company is currently advising customers:

"Our engineers have advised us that all TV channels are now broadcasting, however all Video on Demand / Virgin Central / Interactive / Red button and Electronic Programme Guide (EPG) are still unavailable and being investigated."

At this stage the cause of the outage remains unknown.

Check the latest developments on the forums.