Virgin Media users across London and South East suffered patchy internet service on Saturday and Sunday, which kept them disconnected from popular sites including Wikipedia and the Guardian

The outage also affected the video-on-demand, or TiVO service. Standard definition content from the broadband provider’s catch up on demand service was also jerky at some points.

Virgin Media held rats responsible for the recent outages. Describing the cause, the broadband provider said rats chewed through and damaged its fibre cables.

The statement released by Virgin Media stated, “The loss of service was due to rodent damage to some underground cabling.” Adding, “We've now put additional measures in place to prevent further damage to our cables to avoid further disruption for our customers."

The company claimed that its engineers were on site and worked at the top priority to repair the damage. The service could reportedly be restored on Monday evening.

But, virgin Media customers in some areas were reporting patchy service even on Tuesday morning, engineers to return to repair the further damage.