Time Warner Cable customers should not have to pay for service when an outage makes it unavailable, but like most cable and phone companies you will not get a service credit without asking.

Stop the Cap! decided to test Time Warner Cable’s responsiveness to a request for two recent outages — one widespread and one local:

Cyber Monday Slowdown: Although Time Warner Cable claimed an outage on Nov. 30 only affected a few thousand customers, evidence from websites like Down Detector found the cable operator’s broadband service slowing to a crawl early Monday morning after midnight eastern time, eventually failing completely for some overnight. Problems multiplied on Monday afternoon in the midwest, particularly in states like Ohio and Kentucky where Internet service was disrupted on one of the busiest online shopping days of the year.

Western NY Football Sunday Fadeout: In western New York, Time Warner Cable’s service collapsed right in the middle of Sunday’s Buffalo Bills game against the Houston Texans. Messing with a televised football game approaches a criminal offense in many communities across the country, and angry fans burned up Time Warner’s phone lines with complaints about the service outage, which took out television service for about an hour, particularly in Rochester.

Neither interruption will result in automatic rebates to affected customers. Instead, Time Warner will grant a service credit of one day of service for each reported outage when customers ask.

The quickest way we found to snare credits (which turned out to amount to $8.16 for us — hardly an insignificant amount) was to use Time Warner’s online chat system.

Here’s how:

1. Login to your account at: https://myservices.timewarnercable.com/
2. Look for the Chat button on the right side of your screen and select it
3. What we wrote: “We are writing to request service credits for the service outages on Nov. 30 and Dec. 6.”
4. What they wrote: “I have applied credit on your account for two days of $8.16. It will be reflected in your next bill.”

The entire process from start to finish took just over five minutes.