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Virgin Media O2 has apologised after thousands in the UK reported they were unable to access the internet for the second time in one day.

Downdetector, which tracks websites, showed more than 54,000 people reported their broadband was not functioning on Tuesday afternoon.

It came as Virgin contacted customers to advise them of price increases - averaging at a 13.8% higher bill.

The firm apologised for inconvenience caused by the outages.

The second outage began about 16:00 BST on 4 April according to Downdetector - just a few hours after Virgin announced it had fixed a previous fault.

That problem had seen customers losing connection overnight and into the morning, with just under 26,000 people telling the website they could not access their broadband at 08:00.

By the afternoon the number of reports had decreased. The actual number of people who were affected by the outage is unclear, because users must have an additional way to access the internet - such as a mobile device with 4G - in order to report the problem.

Virgin had previously told customers it was aware of an issue with broadband services, and was "working to identify and fix the problem as quickly as possible".

It has around 5.8 million home broadband users across the UK, according to its latest figures.

Like other internet suppliers, Virgin is raising its prices from April 2023 for existing customers.

It is also changing the terms of its contracts to bring it in line with most other suppliers, which increase the cost of broadband contracts by the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) or Retail Prices Index (RPI) measures of inflation plus nearly 4% - meaning some services are increasing monthly bills by 17.3%.