COLUMBUS, Ohio – Time Warner Cable says a problem that occurred during routine maintenance caused a nationwide outage of its Internet service for hours on Wednesday morning.
UPDATE-Time Warner released the following statement Wednesday evening:“During an overnight network maintenance activity in which we were managing IP addresses, an erroneous configuration was propagated throughout our national backbone, resulting in a network outage. We immediately identified and corrected the root cause of the issue and restored service by 7:30am ET. We apologize for any inconvenience this caused our customers. A failure of this size is very serious and we are taking the necessary steps to improve our processes with the objective of making sure this doesn’t happen again.”
Along with thousands of people across Ohio, potentially millions of customers in New York, New England, the Southeast, Texas, Chicago and Los Angeles were affected, but the company has not released an estimate of the exact number of homes and businesses whose service was interrupted
Reports indicated most service was restored in Columbus and the rest of Ohio by about 7:00 a.m.
The company released a statement which stated that “[a]t 430 a.m. ET today, during routine network maintenance, an issue with our Internet backbone created disruption with our Internet and On Demand services. As of 6 a.m. ET services were largely restored, as updates continue to bring all affected customers back online,” according to spokesman Mike Hogan.
The Internet backbone is the term used for the paths that local or regional networks connect to in order to carry data long distances.
The company says the problem affected all of its markets and updates continue to bring all customers back online. The outage sparked widespread complaints on social networks.
Time Warner Cable, which is being acquired by rival cable company Comcast, has about 11 million subscribers nationwide.
On Tuesday, the company settled with the Federal Communications Commission for $1.1 million to stop an investigation into accusations Time Warner failed to report multiple network outages.