Subscribe[Update 1:34PM EDT: The problem was traced to a failure in the Northeast Regional Office in Syracuse, New York. The outage impacted service from Maine to the east, Buffalo in the west. Time Warner in Albany was quoted as saying the failure was "widespread."]
[Update 12:50PM EDT: Service is restored in Rochester.]
A major service outage has taken out Road Runner and Digital Phone services from Time Warner in the northeastern United States. In the New York area, the Road Runner outage extends throughout Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Albany, to name a few. The outage began at around 10:00am EDT.
Digital Phone is out in several areas as well, including in Rochester.
Time Warner does not know what is causing the problem, nor is there any estimate for service restoration.
As usual, the “Network Status” section on Road Runner’s home page shows nothing about an outage that has jammed local Time Warner phone lines with upset customers.
Other stories of interest:
- Rochester Television Stations Break News About Road Runner Usage Caps
- Stop the Cap! Reader Featured on Area Newscast Protesting Road Runner Usage Caps
- Turbocharging Profits: Road Runner Ration Plan Breakdown
- Road Runner Is For The Birds: Time to Fly Away! (Rochester Edition)
- My Road Runner Service Down As Of This Morning
This affects me, and it sucks big time. Luckily my school was smart enough to not go with Time Warner / Roadrunner, so I was actually able to walk to campus so I could study.
Bring on the PR blunders!!!!!!
I’m using my iPhone to post this.
Just to let everyone my Road Runner just came back up. So they were down for about three hours.
I am not concerned about down time.. after all, machines fail once in a while. What I am concerned about is lack of notification on resources available to TW… such as the RNews page. At least notify those that may turn to that channel that there is an issue and that it is being worked on. But they won’t do that there while they are running RR commercials every 5 minutes.
When I couldn’t log on, I thought I’d have to call the “overuse department”
Yep…. me too
It just came back a minute ago. I did a quick speed check off the TW system and to NYC it came back 5896 down 348 up. That is still pretty sad for modern broadband. Every company will have down time. It might be a plow digging up a big pipe it might be somebody from the Darwin awards cutting a tree down over the wires that feed us. Because this was massive I feel better it did not just affect me or a few but many and to be frank they dont need this at this time. So its back were cool. Now if we could only roll back the clock a month and pretend none of this cap stuff ever happened we could forget the battles and wars.
Sun spots?
Zombies?
Heavy users?
Karma?
Spin it ,TW, spin it.
Internet access down in Watertown, NY and local area. No help from TW customer service but she (rep) indicated estimated resolution between 16:30 & 18:30 Hours today. We wil see.
Appears to DNS related issue as I was able to navigate to one (fixed IP) security page and download a daily anti-virus update.
Digital phone is still working.
Sending this through my Blackberry 9530 (Storm) on Verizon network – no problem accessing internet.
Now all the customers will want credit for their 3 hour outage
It was a DNS related outage. I put opendns in as my dns as was able to have everything work just fine.
Funny though, as it took me all on 20 minutes to figure that out.
Also, my Vonage phone never went down, and the TW phones only went fast busy. The couple of times it did ring, they rand 1 time and then went busy.
During the whole thing, I was fine though after I figured out the DNS thing. For the future, people may want to use http://www.opendns.org as a backup dns service (or primary, if you preferr).
Ron: I often think of posts that were made hours ago. You had a post open dns. I use it a second source allready but while off topic many do not know what to do with it. Your input would be very important on DNS and how to use it. Their instructions are good but sometimes you have to push a person deep enough into their computer and router to do it. Some do not like to mess with internal settings. For most of us a regedit would be childs play, for some a real mess in a hurry. They do not have to play with their reg but it is still something internal.
Yea, I know what you mean. But changing DNS is very easy, and they have screen shots and everything there. I use them as the primary DNS on my kids computers for their filtering capabilies.
It started as a DNS outage here, but I lost the ability to access fixed IP sites, too.
This was not a bright day for TWC Rochester PR. They were even frustrated over at R News, where they knew there was a problem (including their own internal phone service, which was intermittent) but weren’t allowed to put anything on the air until it had been vetted by the corporate puppetmasters upstairs.
It took a (deadly serious) threat to switch all my service (digital cable, premium channels, RR Turbo) over to Frontier and Dish first thing Monday morning to get anything more than a day of service credit from them. First there were three hours of busy signals at 756-5000, which rather gave the lie to the CSR’s claim of “well, we let everyone know with a recording on the phone line.” Not good if you don’t have enough incoming lines to handle a big service outage…the busy signal was nowhere near as informative as, say, a crawl on R News might have been.
This was straw #3, by the way – first the usage caps (only sleeping, not dead, as the CSR who gave me the credit admitted), then a digital cable outage Monday afternoon/evening, and now this.
I remember during a big windstorm last fall, Time Warner service was knocked out at around 5am, and I figured I should call now and get on the list early. I was left on hold nearly 30 minutes, so I figured they were slammed with calls.
When I finally got through, the woman who took my call admitted that she was the ONLY person there overnight for all of Rochester and nearby communities to take customer service calls. ONE PERSON. Amazing….
I asked the second-tier CSR I talked to about whether any management had been called in to deal with today’s big problem. He claimed they have managers there until 11 each night (weeknight?) and that people were in this morning to help manage the response.
Seems to me they needed more, too.
(Happy belated birthday, btw…)
Ron with respect it was more then DNS. After years of watching the modem blinking I know what should be blinking and what should not. The modem was dead there was no connection. I have seen many DNS problems the last few months but there was always the router signal light blinking to tell me I was still connected. Yet It is very possible what went wrong affected many in different ways. My connection was just dead.
During the outage I had connection and downlink activity on the modem, but no uplink, so I knew it was a DNS issue at the very least. I am going to seriously investigate switching to Frontier, even though I know that Frontier’s service is also a consumer grade service with no SLA, perhaps just as idiotic customer service, etc. So why would I change? Simply to send a me$$age.
Frontier does have some great customer service. As per their capacity to handle floods of calls, I wouldn’t know but considering how small they are compared to Time Warner, it’s probably less.
Could be, that was my experience. My outage was 20 minutes. Reset my dns number and when I saw it was back on at around 1:30 or so (I had another computer I did not change) I reset back to theirs.
Eveything worked, including my vonage phone service. So I did have connectivity the whole time.
TWC Blow: I do not agree if your electric went out for three hours would you ask them for a refund? Things just happen. You have to look at the big picture. It is not easy keeping all these systems running 24/7/365 but for the most part they do run. Some joke about sun spots but if a extra large blast hits us it will be a mess. All that wire makes for great energy attraction. It has happened before it will happen again.
Uncle Ken: But the point is that there was no way to KNOW what was going on … busy signal on all TWC numbers (except the recruiting line; I suggest recruiting work REAL hard on getting more professional customer service executives!), nothing on R News, etc. This is NOT the way to handle a major outage.
Being a techie, I am able to say definitively that the portion of the service which was down was Time Warner’s DNS servers. If you had a numeric IP address, you could get through during the “downtime”.
There may have been an actual outage somewhere else…. perhaps *between* me and the DNS servers.
My home service was out, and it was not just a DNS issue for me. The “ready” light on my modem was just blinking (instead of solid) and my router would not get an external IP address. Our institution has RoadRunner business class and was unaffected (we host our own web site, and I was able to load it from my cell phone).
Nathanael: For me is was an outage. No Router signals so no dns. The router lights tell all, no blink no connection.
Roadrunner was out in my neighborhood. I had gotten a few calls from my neighbors asking if they could use my Wireless connection to get online for a little while until Roadrunner came back up. I use DSL here.
Wee: no problem with your comment. No there is no timely way to know and as far as help they are cutting help staff so you may be on the phone waiting for hours for someone that does not have a clue. In more important world news
“Swiss heartland voters ban nude hiking”
Just checked R News website. No mention of this huge outage.
It started out as a dns problem since I was still connected to a game server when msn messenger went offline and I couldn’t hit any sites. By the time I tired enabled the manual dns setting in my router it had gone out completely.
Internet access working normally as of 14:30 (Sunday, April 26) in our area.
Our problem here (Watertown area) was definitely DNS related per my previous post. Other than my re-boot of modem and router on my home LAN, never noticed any interruption of connectivity.
When it started for me, randome sites were not loading at first. Then the whole net was unobtainable.
RR has once again been on and off early this morning here.