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Time Warner Cable’s Nationwide Outage; Politicians Protest, Customers Can Get Service Credits

Phillip Dampier August 27, 2014 Consumer News, Public Policy & Gov't 2 Comments
Just one technician can bring Time Warner Cable service to its knees for millions of customers nationwide.

Just one technician can bring Time Warner Cable to its knees.

Time Warner Cable broadband and on-demand television services were unavailable for about three hours this morning after routine maintenance turned into a nationwide outage that affected early risers trying to go online.

Things began to go wrong at around 4:30am ET when Time Warner Cable Internet connections began dropping across the country. The problems also affected on-demand viewing for Time Warner Cable TV customers and brought down Time Warner Cable’s own website.

The company blamed a problem with their backbone connection during routine maintenance. The company said it schedules such work for the very early morning hours to minimize customer disruptions. But once alarm clocks on the east coast began ringing, customers discovered they had no Internet service.

The outage persisted until around 6am ET, although some customers were not back online until after 7am.

Although complaints about Time Warner Cable began flooding social media networks as the sun went up, customers also used the outage as an opportunity to oppose the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger. The outage demonstrates that a single technician making a mistake at one of the nation’s largest cable companies can disable services for millions.

Virtually every provider experiences a significant outage affecting many or most of their customers at least once a year:

This outage map illustrates this morning's service disruption at Time Warner Cable.

This outage map depicts this morning’s service disruption at Time Warner Cable.

Time Warner Cable will credit you for their outage, but only if you ask:

Meanwhile, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo promised an investigation in a statement issued Wednesday:

Today’s widespread internet outage that has apparently impacted more than 11 million customers at Time Warner – which is based in New York – is a stark reminder that our economy is increasingly dependent on a reliable broadband network. That is one of the reasons why I pushed for a stronger standard of review for cable company mergers earlier this year.

I have directed the New York State Department of Public Service to investigate this outage as part of its review of Comcast’s proposed merger with Time Warner. The Department will also review whether the outage affected Time Warner’s provision of telephone service in any way. In addition, the Department will include its analysis of this event in its ongoing study of the telecom industry, which is exploring potential changes to the regulatory landscape pertaining to telephone, internet and cable. Dependable internet service is a vital link in our daily lives and telecommunications companies have a responsibility to deliver reliable service to their customers.

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Joe Porter
Joe Porter
9 years ago

To be fair, do we know it was in fact “one technician” that caused the issue?

elfonblog
9 years ago

It hit us here in Austin TX. It looked like a DNS outage… but I was using Google DNS. Routing was NOT down… I could still access a selection of web servers by direct IP address, and ping and traceroute. Rebooted my modem and router repeatedly. Modem acquired a link quickly, and status page showed it had a valid configuration. Modem’s signal strength dropped from the usual minus-8-ish to minus-6-ish dBmV. Router acquired IP and WAN domain name effortlessly. I tried OpenDNS, Earthlink, Dell, and some other public DNS servers I have in a list, but they didn’t work either.… Read more »

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