Virgin Media's broadband and TV service appears to have stopped working properly.

The outage comes as huge numbers of people across the country rely on their internet connections to help them study and work from home.

Affected users complained on Twitter and other social networking sites that their broadband connections had gone down or they were unable to watch television.

Outage tracking website Down Detector saw a huge surge in reports of people struggling to use their TV and internet connections.

The problems appeared to be affecting users all across the UK, the site showed.

Virgin Media responded to some affected users – including broadcaster India Willoughby – on Twitter. It apologised for any problems users were having, but did not make clear whether all affected users were being hit by the same problem.

Some users also reported they were unable to get onto Virgin Media's service status checker website. That site allows customers to check whether their service is offline, and when it might come back.

The company did not respond to a request for comment from The Independent.

Though home internet companies are seeing huge traffic over their broadband and TV connections, they have largely stayed online through the coronavirus lockdown.

Many companies such as YouTube and PlayStation have made changes to their internet infrastructure to help alleviate the load on internet connections, reducing the default quality of videos and speed of downloads.

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