Time Warner Cable Goes Down Nation-Wide

It's been a rough week for broadband Internet subscribers. Last weekend, Charter Communications suffered a widespread service outage that affected customers in several states, and now Time Warner Cable is scrambling to fix an issue with its Internet infrastructure that also caused service disruptions across the United States.

The good news here is that TWC's cable and Internet services are "largely restored," according to a Twitter post by Good Morning America. The cable giant is placing blame on "an issue with our Internet backbone" during routine network maintenance, whereas it's believed Charter may have been the victim of DNS hacking.

Time Warner Cable Van
Image Source: Flickr (Michael Dougherty)

According to data at DownDetector.com, TWC's outage became severe around 3 AM Eastern Time when thousands of reports started pouring in. Reports came from both coasts, as well as several states in between, though they were mostly concentrated in parts of the midwest and eastward.

If there's a bright side to this, it's that it happened in the late hours of the night (or early hours of the morning, depending on perspective) rather than mid-day. Being a weekday, most of TWC's subscribers were probably in bed and sleeping during the outage.

Time Warner Cable is the second largest cable operator in the U.S. with approximately 11 million subscribers. It's also the target of an acquisition by Comcast, the top cable operator in the U.S., in a deal worth about $45.2 billion. That deal is on hold pending regulatory approval.