A DNS failure took out internet service for more than 15 hours for many Charter Communications broadband customers in Texas.
Outages were first reported Wednesday evening from customers unable to reach web pages or other internet services. The outages primarily affected former Time Warner Cable customers in Dallas-Ft. Worth, San Antonio, and Austin.
A Charter spokesperson admitted there was a widespread outage last evening that extended into this morning. At 8:38am, the company suggested rebooting your cable modem to restore service, but as of lunchtime, admitted problems are ongoing in certain areas.
The outage affected the company’s broadband service and its Spectrum TV app, which relies on the internet for video streaming its cable TV service.
Some customers exploring the outage discovered the problem was with Charter’s DNS servers, which manage website addresses. All customers needed to do to restore service was to stop relying on the cable company’s DNS servers and use another provider like Google instead. (If interested, instructions are here.)
Customers were miffed that it took more than half a day to resolve the problem. Those without service can get a service credit for the outage by visiting the cable company’s website and using its online chat function to request credit.
Texas customers, our apologies as we are seeing a return of Internet service issues. Thank you for your continued patience.
— Ask Spectrum (@Ask_Spectrum) November 2, 2017
DNS was down as of 7:30p last night in Austin. As of an hour ago it still wasn’t up so Level3’s settings are now in my router. Er..CenturyLink’s. Whichever.
Thought it was weird that my hard-wired connection was working but WiFi wasn’t. Then remembered I had set DNS locally on the system that’s connected via Ethernet 🙂
Hard to believe they don’t have a back up… o wait no it isn’t 🙂 Run lean and mean to save those bucks.
ISPs occasionally have DNS outages. Those who are technically skilled should consider using an alternate DNS like OpenDNS or Google DNS.
Switching DNS servers did not work, the DNS server is still down. 6/1/18 9:45 am