New York state officials are investigating what caused a massive nationwide outage on Time Warner Cable's network early Wednesday morning.
The telecom, which is striving to merge with Comcast, says the problem has been resolved and all service issues have been settled. The company said it took about an hour and a half to restore service that arose after "an issue with our Internet backbone created disruption with our Internet and On Demand services," said Bobby Amirshahi, TWC vice president for public relations.
"As of 6 a.m. ET, services were largely restored as updates continue to bring all customers back online," he said.
The outage saw all of Time Warner Cable's 11.4 million Internet users in 29 different states get hit with the outage. The wee hours timing reduced what could have been an even more frustrating event had it occurred even two hours later.
Outage reports have said the loss of service began around 3 a.m. during routine maintenance and shortly thereafter users began to inform the public that their broadband service was out.
In a strange week of events, TWC had on Monday agreed to pay a $1.1 million penalty for failing to file "a substantial number" of proper reports on similar outages to the Federal Communications Commission. The company hopes that its response and quickness in ending it's most recent outage will be seen as a sign the company is looking to bolster its public image and reputation.
New York regulatory officials want to know what caused the outage in light of its review of TWC potentially merging with Comcast. New York Governor has directed the state's Department of Public Service to determine TWC reliability in relation of the merger.
Time Warner is not the only company to face Internet outages this week, as the country's fourth-largest Internet service provider Charter Communication also saw a loss of service for its users, Tech Times reports.
The outage came to media attention following users' posts on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook saw Charter's pages inundated with complaints. Frustration grew as the company failed to immediately respond to any complaints on those sites.
A company spokesperson, Kim Haas, says the company believes the issue to be "intermittent across parts of our footprint." She adds that the company is not yet able to make a diagnosis as to what caused the outages.
The issues also come as the companies are facing increasing threats from competitors, especially Google and AT&T as they roll out new ultra-fast Internet service. AT&T has just announced the launch of its flagship GigaPower for Silicon Valley, Tech Times reports. The move should help propel the company forward as it aims to boost its presence as an ISP.
