The problem is getting better, but not as quickly as Virgin would like. At 2:24pm Saturday, it issued the following statement::

There is currently a network outage affecting some of our customers. The fault began early this morning and is impacting some people's ability to SMS, call and use data. The outage does not affect emergency calls and pre paid customers are not being affected. I would like to sincerely apologise to those being affected by this outage and let you know that we have all hands on deck to resolve this. We absolutely appreciate the urgency of the situation and are doing everything we can to get things back up and running ASAP.

We will also be crediting each customer affected their access fee for the entire day in compensation. As we have more information we will update Facebook and Twitter and we very much appreciate your patience during this time.

The statement was attributed to David Scribner, Head of Virgin Mobile Australia.

Social media is still in overdrive. It is a public relations disaster for the company, coming at a time when many customers have a lot of idle time on their hands to post their feelings.