The internet outage

Internet service provider (ISP) Virgin Media has suffered a major outage with some people kept offline for as long as 24 hours. Virgin Media suffers internet outage? The Pirate Bay was down across the U.S. for at least three hours on Friday, an outage that comes as the site’s latest bandwidth provider comes under pressure from entertainment companies.

The ISP was experiencing problems on Tuesday (September 29th) and they continued into yesterday. The outage affected people’s email and broadband accounts. Pirate Bay suffers outage. A spokesperson for Virgin Media confirmed that the company was experiencing difficulties – something which may have been picked up with website monitoring services.

They said: “Power fluctuations at one of our facilities in Berkshire caused some customers in the local area internet outage to experience intermittent disruption to their services.” “It also affected the virginmedia.com website and some of our customers were temporarily unable to log into their email accounts,” they added. The spokesperson concluded that engineers had been working on the problem around the clock and full service was restored by lunchtime (September 30th).

Virgin Media has suffered email problems previously, with its services going down at the start of September. The last bout of downtime was caused by a cluster failure, the company said.

Pirate Bay suffers outage

The Pirate Bay was down across the U.S. for at least three hours on Friday, an outage that comes as the site’s latest bandwidth provider comes under pressure from entertainment companies. CNET noted that the site was down at 1:22 p.m. PDT but appeared to come back up at 4:50 p.m. PDT. The cause for the blackout was unclear. Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, one of The Pirate Bay’s co-founders did not respond to interview requests.

The Pirate Bay, the BitTorrent search engine loved by file sharers but loathed by many copyright owners, has had trouble in the past few months with its Internet service providers. The most recent example came on Thursday night when a Ukrainian ISP cut off service to the site after receiving legal threats from copyright owners, according to the blog TorrentFreak. The Pirate Bay was operational Friday morning so Enigmax from TorrentFreak speculated the search engine likely had a substitute provider ready to go. It’s possible there were technical issues involved with the switchover.

The Pirate Bay was forced to look for a new ISP after a Swedish court, at the request of the trade groups representing the music and film industries, threatened The Pirate Bay’s former ISP provider with fines unless it stopped servicing the site. Earlier on Friday, Google stopped indexing The Pirate Bay but later acknowledged it booted the site from its search results by mistake.