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Virgin Orbit files for bankruptcy protection as search for buyer continues
It was not a very good day for companies carrying the Virgin brand. Virgin Orbit, the satellite launch company founded by Sir Richard Branson, has filed for US bankruptcy protection.
Last-ditch efforts to find funding for a struggling space company have failed, The Guardian’s Kaliena Makortoff reports.
It comes less than a week after the company announced it was cutting 85% of its workforce, leaving roughly 100 employees to run what’s left of the business. The US-based company will seek a buyer for its assets.
Dan Hart, CEO of the company, said:
While we have worked hard to resolve our financial situation and secure additional funding, we ultimately have to do what is best for the business.
We believe the advanced startup technology this team has created will have broad appeal to buyers as we continue the process of selling the company. At this stage, we believe the Chapter 11 process represents the best way forward to identify and finalize an efficient and value-maximizing sale.
The bankruptcy proceedings began three months after Virgin Orbit, founded by Branson and 75% owned by Virgin Investments, failed in its mission to launch the first satellite from UK soil in January.
The company said the botched launch, seen as a historic moment for the UK, was the result of an anomaly which meant the rocket could not reach the required altitude and was subsequently lost.
Virgin Orbit subsequently suspended operations and laid off the employee in early March as it sought to secure a funding rescue.
You can read the full report here.
The latest outage isn’t the only reason Virgin Media has faced criticism in recent weeks; mobile subscribers this month will also have to face an inflation-busting price hike of up to 17.3% this year.
Virgin Mobile and O2, both under the same company from 2021, have increased the price of their airtime contracts, or what customers pay for calls, texts and data, in line with the Retail Price Index (RPI) inflation announced this week. at annual rates. , plus 3.9 percentage points.
The much-criticized RPI measure of inflation is generally higher than other indicators. The scale of the automatic price rise prompted criticism of the companies from Labor in February.
Ofcom, the UK’s telecoms regulator, launched an investigation in February into the industry’s practice of inflated prices.
Are Virgin Media customers eligible for any compensation in relation to this outage?
The answer is as follows. probably not, given their existing conditions.
We’ve asked Virgin Media if it will pay any compensation in relation to this outage, but meanwhile an online Q&A says it will;
£9.33 a day total loss of service 2 full business days after you register the loss of service with us
Given the scale of the outage reported by third-party monitors, a voluntary decision by Virgin Media to pay compensation is likely to be very costly.
According to DownDetector, the surge in outage reports at Virgin Media appears to be slowing down.
From a peak just before 8am BST this morning, it has fallen back to near-baseline levels.
Several customers have reported on social media that their connections have been restored.
It looks like the engineers have finally arrived.
Virgin Media’s main site appears to serve a mobile version, and we were unable to access its local service checker.
The company’s reserve status website states:
Alex Hearn
As of 8:30 a.m., Virgin Media’s website is back up, albeit in a severely reduced form, while some users are reporting that they can reconnect to the internet after restarting their router or modem.
Still others are reporting that the internet outage can be bypassed by connecting via a virtual private network (VPN), hinting at where the wider problems lie and suggesting that a Virgin Media outage like the one at Facebook in 2021 could be the result of a flaw in the deep-level routing systems that allow Internet services to connect to each other.
You can read more about what can cause these problems here.
Virgin Media is confirming broadband issues
Virgin Media has confirmed there is an “issue affecting broadband services”.
Contact centers were also affected, Twitter said in a statement. It has so far given no indication of the scale of the problem.
It said:
Our teams are currently working to identify and fix the issue as quickly as possible, and we apologize to any affected customers.
We are aware of an issue affecting Virgin Media’s customer broadband services as well as our contact centres. Our teams are currently working to identify and fix the issue as quickly as possible, and we apologize to any affected customers.
— Virgin Media (@virginmedia) April 4, 2023
Here’s a map of user reports of Virgin Media outages (again via DownDetector).
As you can see, the reports are quite common in the largest cities where most of the fiber broadband customers are concentrated.
Virgin Media users began reporting thousands of problems after 1 a.m. Tuesday, according to DownDetector, a web statistics provider.
DownDetector data indicates when crash reports rise above the normal baseline. As of 1:53 a.m., the number of outage reports had reached more than 15,000. After a midnight break, it seems there are thousands more people reporting morning outages rushing to log in.
Virgin Media users report outages
Good morning and welcome to our live coverage of business, economy and financial markets.
Virgin Media users across the UK are reporting problems with internet access.
The website DownDetector showed thousands of reports of outages starting shortly after 1 a.m. Tuesday, with the largest number of reports since 6:30 a.m. as users tried to log in in the morning.
Twitter users have posted that they are unable to access the internet through their Virgin connections.
Virgin Media’s website did not appear to be available on Tuesday morning.
The company has been contacted for comment.
The agenda
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9:00am BSTCredit Suisse Annual Meeting
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9:00am BSTEuropean Central Bank Consumer Expectations Survey
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10:00am BSTSpeech by Silvana Tenreiro of the Bank of England