Time-Warner Internet And Phone Services Back On Line

SAN DIEGO - Internet and telephone service for thousands of Southern California homes and businesses went out for more than six hours today, as one of the largest Internet providers grappled with a system-wide failure in its network serving San Diego and large areas in the Los Angeles, Orange County and Palm Springs areas.

The data interruption

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 two million Southern California businesses and homes subscribe to Time-Warner for cable television, however 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.

At midafternoon, and as repaired software rolled out across the company's routers, Gordon said modems would automatically detected service and reboot. Clients 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 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. No link between the storm and the California failure has been established, Gordon said.