Subscribe
If you are a Time Warner Cable “digital phone” customer living in New York or western Massachusetts, you can get a few dollars of your money back thanks to serious outages that have plagued the cable company for the past two weeks.
The worst problems occurred yesterday, when customers across the entire region couldn’t make or receive calls in many instances.
“My wife said it was like the whole system crashed,” reports Stop the Cap! reader Marcus, who lives near Syracuse. “A lot of people here are very upset.”
Marcus reports he couldn’t even work around the outage by trying to set up call forwarding to send calls to his cell phone or another Voice Over IP provider.
“I tried to forward my Time Warner calls to a Vonage number I have and that didn’t work either,” Marcus writes.
We heard from several readers in Rochester, Albany, Syracuse, and even into western parts of Massachusetts that calling a Time Warner Cable customer from a cell phone or a landline from Verizon or Frontier was nearly impossible without getting a recording or busy signal.
Small business customers using Time Warner’s phone service were also impacted in some cases.
Lakeview Deli in Saranac Lake posted a message on its Facebook page just before noon, advising its customers to call in their lunch orders using a cell phone number because of the problems with its main phone line. Owner John Van Anden said he normally gets 30 to 40 calls around the lunch hour; he got only four on Tuesday.
“It hurt (business) quite a bit just because you can’t get phone calls from customers,” he said.
The outage, which lasted more than 12 hours, was reportedly finally fixed by the cable company last evening at around 11pm. No explanation for the outage was given by Time Warner Cable.
This is the third major service problem for Time Warner’s phone service this month:
- Time Warner misdirected 911 emergency service calls to a call center in Colorado;
- Time Warner underestimated call volumes, leaving customers in central New York with “all circuits are busy” recordings or busy signals;
- Yesterday’s collapse of Time Warner’s phone network.
“Wow, this is starting to make Frontier look good again,” says our Rochester reader Kevin. “I’ll be dropping my phone service with the cable company when my promotion ends and sticking with my Verizon cell phone.”
With all of these service outages, you know what that means — it’s time to go grab those service credits. Customers in central New York can apply for at least a week of service credits because of the ongoing problems the company faces handling call volumes. Everyone else in the region with “Digital Phone” service qualifies for a day’s worth of credit. But you won’t get it unless you ask. We’ve made asking simple, with our cut and paste process:
Stop the Cap! Presents Your Easy Service Credit Request Menu
Customers in the northeast can request one day of credit for yesterday’s phone outage. Residents in central New York, including Syracuse — can ask for one week of credit for ongoing call congestion problems.
Sample Request You Can Cut and Paste:
I am writing to request one day service credit for the phone service outage that occurred in my area yesterday, Tuesday Jan. 18th. Please credit my account.
[Central NY Residents ONLY]: I am writing to request a credit for one week of telephone service to cover the company’s ongoing intermittent call connection problems in our area as well as yesterday’s (Jan. 18) more widespread service disruption. I am concerned about the repeated problems Time Warner seems to be having in correctly servicing my telephone needs. Please credit my account.
Use the Online E-Mail form, select Billing Inquiry, and send a message requesting credit.
[flv width=”480″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WSYR Syracuse Another Phone Outage 1-18-11.flv[/flv]
WSYR-TV in Syracuse is spending plenty of time covering Time Warner’s phone outages and other problems. Here’s the fourth report this month, covering yesterday’s widespread problem. (Warning: Loud Volume) (2 minutes)
