Some of the cities experiencing issues include Birmingham, Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool, London and Manchester, according to data from website DownDetector

Virgin Media customers are enduring persistent issues with their broadband this evening with the service cutting out four times so far.

The issues have been affecting tens of thousands of people in all parts of the country for hours across the UK and Ireland.

Complaints have been reported of the internet being down in Surrey, London, Leeds, Brighton, Southampton, Glasgow and Cardiff. It is thought to be UK-wide.

The DownDetector service recorded more than 45,000 reports and four separate spikes of disruption.

Many said their service had come back online shortly after the outage but others reported ongoing problems nearly an hour later.

The outage began at roughly 5.45pm.

Users were complaining of having no broadband or very slow internet speed hours after the first complaints began flooding in.

Many are getting frustrated as they try and connect during lockdown.

A Virgin Media spokesperson said at around 7pm: We’re currently investigating an intermittent broadband issue that lasted for a very short period of time earlier this evening. While services are currently back up and running, our teams are looking into the problem and will work flat out to fix it. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

In a subsequent statement the firm added: We’re aware of an intermittent broadband issue which has been causing connections to drop for a couple of mins and then return again. This isn’t due to capacity or usage problems and our teams are currently working on a fix. We know it’s frustrating and we’re sorry #virginmedia.

The telecoms firm has been tweeting some customers to apologise and says its aware of “technical issues” affecting some customers.

Virgin has been responding to complaints on Twitter, saying it is investigating a ‘fault’.

Its official account said: I’m sorry that you experienced this issue, we are aware that there was a fault, and we are working hard to get this fixed ASAP.