Facebook BLOCKED in the UK - if you are on this broadband network

UPDATE: Virgin Media says that the issue has now been fixed, and its customers are now able to access Facebook, Messenger and Instagram once again.

The company told Express.co.uk, “We have now investigated an issue which meant some Virgin Media customers were intermittently not able to access Facebook and Instagram."

"This was due to an interconnect router going down on Virgin Media’s network meaning that some of our DNS requests were not able to contact Facebook servers. Our fault has now been fixed and we apologise for any inconvenience caused.”

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Facebook has been hit by a major outage across the UK after the site was blocked by one of the country’s biggest internet providers. 

Virgin Media broadband customers were left unable to log in to the social media giant site since yesterday evening as the network dealt with a connectivity issue.

Users of Facebook Messenger and Instagram (which is owned by Facebook) were also affected.

A Virgin Media spokesperson told The Inquirer that "We're aware of an intermittent issue that's affected some of our broadband customers accessing Facebook and Instagram.”

"We believe this was an issue with Facebook's servers, which we understand to be resolved.”

"We're contacting Facebook to confirm our customers can now access these sites.”

The issue now appears to have been fixed, with Virgin Media blaming a DNS connectivity issue, although some users are still reporting not being able to connect.

This means that the company’s network was failing to recognise Facebook as a legitimate web site, and therefore would not connect users to their page.

Virgin Media has around 17 million customers across the UK.

The company’s mobile users were not affected by the outage, as Virgin uses EE to connect its UK smartphone internet network.