Virgin Media customers were left without internet connections last night, following an outage.

Up to three million customers are thought to have been affected by the incident which took place at shortly after 10pm on Monday.

The glitch effected broadband and video on demand services and, according to a statement from Virgin, the fault was fixed by 10am today.

The statement added: "This occurred as a result of an error during a routine maintenance process which affected some customers' modems and set top boxes.

"Most of the problems occurred in the North West, Yorkshire and the Midlands and the majority of affected customers regained their service shortly after midnight."

A spokesperson for Virgin told Theregister.com that the maintenance work had knocked out DHCP address assignments for some of the ISP's servers.

As a consequence, IP addresses were renewed en masse, she explained.