Time Warner Offline: Customer Service Blames Internet Downtime On 'Internet Backbone'

Time Warner Cable Inc.'s (NYSE:TWC) Internet went offline Wednesday at about 4:30 a.m. EDT, with frustrated customers from around the U.S. complaining on Twitter that their service had gone down.

The vast majority of the complaints focused on Time Warner Cable's Internet service, although others reported that their cable had gone out as well. Time Warner Cable’s own website was offline through much of the morning, and the official TWC Help Twitter feed was only sending out updates intermittently. The downtime, while verified by Time Warner Cable itself, was also confirmed by a number of Internet service sites, including DownDetector.com.

Both the East and West Coast seemed to be hit worse than regions toward the center of the country. New York, New Jersey, and areas of California near Los Angeles had experienced hours of downtime, with Time Warner Cable promising on social media to resolve the issue as soon as possible.

"An issue with our Internet backbone created disruption with our Internet and On Demand services," the company said in a statement. “As of 6 a.m., services were largely restored as updates continue to bring all customers back online.”

Time Warner Cable operates in 29 states and has 11.4 million high-speed Internet customers. The company said that cable TV and phone services weren't affected by the Internet downtime.

The massive Internet outage comes one day after Time Warner Cable agreed to pay $1.1 million to settle a Federal Communications Commission investigation, which found that the company failed to correctly report multiple network outages last year.

“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 said in a report published Monday, as quoted by Reuters. “TWC admits that its failure to timely file the required network outage reports violated the Commission’s rules.”

It’s unlikely, though, that Time Warner Cable will again be able to hide such a major outage, as the nationwide frustration Wednesday morning quickly led to multiple trending topics on Twitter, which users presumably accessed from their phones.