Equipment failure blamed for Time Warner Cable Internet outage

A malfunctioning piece of equipment was blamed for a six-hour outage of Time Warner Cable's Internet and phone service Sunday.

The systemwide failure affected thousands of homes

The systemwide failure affected thousands of homes and businesses in the Coachella Valley, Inland Empire and large areas in Los Angeles and Orange counties.

Gordon said the data interruption, which he said was intermittent, as well cut telephone service for clients who use a Time Warner cable or fiber line for bundled Time Warner dial-tone phone service. VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) service like Skype or Vonage was as well affected.

Some 2 million Southern California businesses and homes subscribe to Time Warner for cable television, nevertheless the company will not disclose how many of them as well rely on the firm for cable or fiber-based Internet or telephone service. Gordon said.

Customers could again reset their modems by unplugging them, he said, without risk of disconnecting from a malfunctioning network.

The morning hours

In the morning hours, customer service workers in California told clients the entire Time Warner Internet network was down.

“We've been calling people out of bed to fix this, and we're getting calls from everywhere,” one told a City News Service reporter.

The outage came as the East Coast

The outage came as the East Coast was hit by Hurricane Irene, and computer experts have in the past said that nationwide Internet systems can be brought down by single-point failures.