Cayenne Red preoccupies much of its time creating SEO Reading strategies, with quite a lot of affiliate management thrown in, and what annoys our clients most of all is when the internet fails.

We have become a nation of not only internet users, but also internet traders, so when our beloved toy is taken away from us, we understandably get a little upset.

So when Virgin Media experienced a nationwide broadband failure the other night, you can image the horrors of its users. The earth might have been knocked off its axis with the collective sighs.

Virgin Media is a very promotional cable broadband company which likes to boast that it provides some of the best services out there and many wouldn’t disagree. Yet at a time when boasting that it intends to boost its customer’s broadband speeds by turning up the power dials, it was a bit of an embarrassment to suffer a complete blackout for three hours in peak evening time.

A case of bad timing you might say: one minute a promise to double speeds over the next month, the next, nothing.

It has five million customers, although there are no figures as to how many were eventually affected. Virgin blamed routing hardware problems – yes, we’ve all used that excuse in the past – and the company felt a Tsunami of Tweets and telephone calls as it struggled to turn people back on.

We can only hope that they do indeed boost their broadband speeds, and at the same time keep everything switched on, because, to be fair, it’s quite a decent provider really.