Time Warner Cable is still uncertain as to why nationwide system went out on Aug. 27. The company says it is investigating the incident, which left almost 12 million users across 29 states without access to the Internet. The resulting loss of service led to a barrage of complaints on Twitter and Facebook informing the company their service was out.
It took the company around 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 Time Warner Cable VP for public relations Bobby Amirshahi.
Now, as the service gets going and no more outages have been reported over the past 24 hours, speculation over what caused the service outage to occur has led to much discussion. Purdue University computer scientist Sonia Fahmy says the outage could have been the result of the company updating its servers and software that routers use to communicate to one another with.
"Typically, these outages are due to the routing protocols," she says. That's the kind of foundational function that, if there's a bug in it, could cause widespread problems.
"Either they upgraded the software on some of the routers, and there was some kind of bug in it, or sometimes, it's a human error," she says. Configuring routers for a software update is a complex task, so people make mistakes.
Outage reports have said that the loss of service began around 3 a.m. and shortly thereafter users began to inform the public that their broadband service was out, Tech Times reports.
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 its response and quickness in ending the outage will be seen as a sign the company is looking to bolster its public image and reputation.
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.
The outage came to media attention following users' posts on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook that saw Charter's pages inundated with complaints. Still, frustration grew as the company failed to immediately respond to any complaints on those sites.
