Virgin Media customers are taking to the company's community forums to report issues accessing image hosting site Imgur. If you were using the firms fibre services this week, you may have noticed that imgur.com failed to load, and eventually reported a timeout error.
This isn't the first time the company has had issues connecting its customers to Imgur. A year ago customers again took to the community to report issues with the site being inaccessible. At the time, an employee at the company, James W, who is the community lead, released this statement:
We have noticed some customers having difficulty accessing imgur this morning, and our team are working on this to get this site visible again.
But it seems this wasn't a permanent fix.
As well as Imgur being inaccessible, popular pornography site XVIDEOS also became inaccessible at the same time. Issues were also noticed upon trying to access postimage.org.
In response to complaints on Twitter, the company said that the service isn't intentionally inaccessible:
It appears that this was a routing issue with Virgin Media's servers, as other ISPs can load Imgur correctly, whereas Virgin Media reports a timeout error. They also note that the issue should be resolved by 6:20PM.
As of 4:50PM BST, the issue is resolved.
If you are still facing issues there is a workaround for you to enable access to Imgur again, as posted by jamesh13, which requires editing your hosts file:
Some VM routers aren't routing packets to 185.31.19.193, the default IP for imgur.com DNS lookups in the UK. If you know what you're doing with your hosts file, temporarily add these entries:
185.31.17.193 imgur.com
185.31.17.193 i.imgur.com
185.31.17.193 s.imgur.com
If you'd like to know how to modify the hosts file on Windows, see this tutorial.
We have reached out to Virgin Media for comment on the issue.
Update: We have updated the acclaimed reasoning for the outage, from being a DNS issue to a routing issue. Thanks for letting us know!
Source: Virgin Media Community
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