Virgin Media cable TV customers were left without television service on Thursday night after an outage of nearly national scope hit the cable operator's network.

The alarm was raised on the DS forums just before 21:30, with customers across the UK reporting a loss of most or in some cases all channels.

Posts also reported that Virgin's 150 and 151 customer service lines were "dead" for a period around the time that the outage began.

An electricity supply fault caused an outage of nearly national scope on Virgin's cable TV service last night.

A Virgin Media spokesperson told DS this morning: "At around 9.30pm yesterday evening a high-voltage electricity supply fault interrupted television services from our Langley distribution centre.

"Around 220 channels went off-air. Engineers managed to restore partial service by 10pm, including terrestrial TV, regional TV and general entertainment channels. Sky premium channels were restored at midnight, with all television channels fully restored 30 minutes later. Our on-demand television services were restored by 7am this morning along with the electronic programme guide (EPG) soon after."