NEW YORK (AP & WXXI News) Time Warner Cable says that service was largely restored after a problem that occurred early Wednesday morning during routine maintenance caused a nationwide outage of its Internet service for hours.
Time Warner issued this statement Wednesday night:
“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 7:30 a.m. 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.”
Governor Cuomo also says the state will investigate the outage (see statement below).
The outage sparked widespread complaints on social networks.
Tim Farrar, an analyst at TMF Associates said there are major outages of at least one telecom provider every year, although typically they aren't fully national.
``AT&T had a major outage back in April, Comcast had one last October. Verizon Wireless had several national outages on its 4G network back in 2012,'' he said. ``Usually it is related to bugs in new technology, and occasionally to routine maintenance where someone did something wrong.''
Time Warner Cable, which is in the process of being bought by rival Comcast Corp. for $45 billion, has about 11.4 million high-speed data subscribers in 29 states nationwide. The Federal Communications Commission is reviewing the deal.
Separately, on Tuesday, the FCC said Time Warner Cable, based in New York, would pay $1.1 million to resolve outage reporting violations. The FCC found that Time Warner Cable did not report disruptions in service to its networks to the FCC in a timely enough manner. In addition to the payment, the company is submitting a three-year compliance plan to make sure it will comply with the reporting rules.
Governor Cuomo issued the following statement about the outage.
“Today's widespread internet outage that has apparently impacted more than 11 million customers at Time Warner – which is based in New York – is a stark reminder that our economy is increasingly dependent on a reliable broadband network. That is one of the reasons why I pushed for a stronger standard of review for cable company mergers earlier this year.
“I have directed the New York State Department of Public Service to investigate this outage as part of its review of Comcast's proposed merger with Time Warner. The Department will also review whether the outage affected Time Warner's provision of telephone service in any way. In addition, the Department will include its analysis of this event in its ongoing study of the telecom industry, which is exploring potential changes to the regulatory landscape pertaining to telephone, internet and cable.
“Dependable internet service is a vital link in our daily lives and telecommunications companies have a responsibility to deliver reliable service to their customers.”
