Virgin Media and O2 UK Change Plans for Community Forum Merger

Broadband and mobile providers Virgin Media and O2 (VMO2) have changed their plans for the previously proposed merger of their respective customer community forums. The complexity of the challenge means that they will now focus on reintroducing the two communities separately, at least at first.

Just to recap. Both Virgin Media and O2 took their separate community forums offline for new postings in January 2026 (here), which formed part of their plan to merge them into a single platform (including posts, stats, member accounts etc.). More recently the operators have also removed public access to view posts, so you can’t even read existing content any more.

At the time of the original announcement, we remarked that upgrading and merging two large databases of historic customer content would be a real nightmare to pull off smoothly. Complex database migrations and mergers rarely go without problems and often throw up significant obstacles. This partly explains why VMO2 has never once specified how long the downtime would actually last (i.e. they couldn’t be sure themselves).

ISPreview last posted an update on this in March 2026 (here), at which point we speculated that it might take VMO2 until around mid-2026 to complete the process. The latest development is that VMO2 have put their plans for merging the two forums on hold, at least temporarily, with the operator confirming to us that the “work required is complex” and their new plan is to reintroduce the communities “separately at first“.

The original forums made use of the Khoros platform, although VMO2 has also finally confirmed to ISPreview that the new one will make use of a different solution from Sprinklr, which we’ve been told is a “market leader in customer experience platforms“.

The operator added that they were not yet in a position to confirm exact timelines, although we understand from other sources that the July-August window is currently the aspiration for Virgin Media’s community forum to return. The O2 forum will either relaunch at the same time or follow soon after. A VMO2 spokesperson simply told us they “want to go live as soon as is practically possible“.

Introducing the new platform and migrating each forum separately is a much simpler task (albeit not one without some challenges), relatively speaking. The indication is that VMO2 may return to the idea of a grand merger of both forums again in the future, once they’ve had time to become familiar with the new platform and ensure everything is working smoothly. Sometimes trying to do too many big changes at once can be unwise.

Community forums remain an incredibly popular and useful tool for customers of such services to raise their issues and get support, even during periods where the telecoms provider itself might seem to be unresponsive (community members often help each other out). Suffice to say that there is a lot of interest in the return of both forums.