Time Warner Cable Comes Back From Nationwide Internet Outage

Time Warner Cable, one of the nation's largest cable and broadband providers, suffered an unusual nationwide Internet outage early Wednesday morning, sparking new complaints about the company's service.

Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, said regulators in his state would investigate the downtime as part of an ongoing review of Time Warner Cable's proposed merger with Comcast.

Cuomo called the outage a “stark reminder that our economy is increasingly dependent on a reliable broadband network.”

Time Warner Cable, which serves about 14.5 million of the country's 115 million homes, said the outage occurred at 4:30 a.m. ET “during our routine network maintenance.”

“An issue with our Internet backbone created disruption with our Internet and On Demand services,” the company said in a statement.

Service was mostly restored by 6 a.m., the company said, but there were hiccups well into the morning. At 10:30 a.m., Time Warner Cable's customer service Twitter account said “services should be restored for all customers; our apologies for the interruption.”

Initial signs point to human error, not hacking, as the reason for the outage. But a spokeswoman said the company is “still investigating the root cause.”

Cable TV and phone services were not affected by the Internet downtime, according to the company.

The outage was another black eye for Time Warner Cable, which has a dismal reputation among consumers.

Earlier this year, the American Consumer Satisfaction Index showed Time Warner Cable had the lowest satisfaction rate of any big television provider.

Comcast, the company that is trying to acquire Time Warner Cable, has the second-lowest satisfaction rate in that survey.

Both companies have made big investments to improve customer service and the quality of their products — but of course none of that matters when customers wake up and find out the Internet is not working.

During the outage, some customers said they relied on Internet connections from their smart phones instead.

Broadband providers report outages from time to time, but the incidents are usually localized.

Charter Communications (CHTR) suffered what was described as a nationwide outage last Saturday, but Charter reaches fewer homes than Time Warner Cable, and is generally in smaller markets.

Many of Time Warner Cable's homes are in big metropolitan areas like New York City and Los Angeles. That made Wednesday's outage more noticeable, because it affected journalists and the people who employ them.

The New York blog Gothamist, in its coverage of the outage, quipped that Time Warner Cable customers are “hostages.”

On the other side of the country, the Los Angeles Times quoted an analyst, Roger Entner of Recon Analytics, who said the outage would be seized upon by opponents of the Comcast merger who'll argue that the companies need to address service “before they are allowed to combine and have even bigger problems.”

Time Warner Cable was spun off in 2009 from Time Warner (TWX), the parent company of CNN and CNNMoney. The two companies are no longer affiliated.

CNN