Time Warner internet outage affects millions of US broadband customers

America’s second biggest internet service provider suffered national outages Wednesday morning. Internet service went down for millions of Americans on Wednesday morning after cable company Time Warner suffered a major outage.


The company, which has almost 12m broadband subscribers nationwide, said it was investigating the cause of the outage, which apparently began around 4.30am ET. By 6am, it said “services were largely restored”, but an hour later, said it was still “working to restore services to all areas”. By 10am, the company was telling customers the outage had been resolved, but some social media users said access was still spotty.


Affected users besieged the helplines and social media accounts of the firm, which declared an operating income of $1.1bn in the 2nd quarter of 2014.


On Tuesday, Reuters reported that Time Warner Cable paid $1.1m to resolve an investigation from the Federal Communications Commission that found the provider did not properly report multiple network outages.


“TWC (Time Warner Cable) failed to file a substantial number of reports with respect to a series of reportable wireline and Voice Over Internet Protocol network outages,” the FCC’s report read. “TWC admits that its failure to timely file the required network outage reports violated the commission’s rules.”


The FCC is currently reviewing a deal for company to be purchased by Comcast – a cable and internet giant. The deal comes after Time Warner received a $60bn offer from smaller rival Charter Communications, but accepted Comcast’s offer of $45.2bn after Charter threatened to unseat the company’s board of directors.


Consumer groups have repeatedly warned that combining the two companies would be a disaster for consumers, and would further reduce competition in an already monopolized market. Several studies confirmed that services competing against Comcast, such as Netflix, have been throttled by the company, the delivery speed of media significantly slowed by the ISP.


Time Warner and other cable companies are facing increased competition from companies such as Google. The Silicon Valley giant installed fiber optic cables in several cities around America. It claims the internet speeds are up to 100 times faster than typical broadband.



Guardian.com