**Update, 12/22/08**: I’m still getting reports from readers of Time Warner Cable Internet outages, so I’ve decided to offer a weekly update until the issue is fixed. Read the latest at “The weekly Time Warner Cable status report.”
**UPDATE, Dec. 16, 2008** Because I’ve continued to receive complaints that Time Warner’s Internet is not fixed, I checked in with the company again at “Is Time Warner Cable’s Internet really fixed?“**
If you were one of the thousands who experienced an Internet outage late Monday night, and then Tuesday morning and even possibly today, that issue has been fixed, according to Time Warner Cable spokesman Darryl Ryan.
The outage affected Internet users, and not cable and phone users as some media reported. And the number of affected subscribers was overblown, Ryan said.
“It was no where close to that 1 million number. If I were to estimate it, it was more in the low thousands,” he said.
However, he agreed that if Time Warner’s million-plus Internet users in the area were online at the time, they could have been affected by the outage.
The outage, which started Monday around 10 p.m., lasted a few hours for many. Those who noticed it were viewing Web sites. Another outage started around 3 a.m. Tuesday. But those customers who experienced the worst of it did something you’d think might fix the problem: they rebooted their cable modem.
The problem was with the Domain Name System servers (DNS servers), which lets us type in Web sites as easy-to-remember words (like ocregister.com) as opposed to numbers (69.25.233.228). The DNS resolves numbers into letters. Without these translations functioning, web browsers are unable to locate their destinations.
“From preliminary findings, we had a component failure. One of our networks went down. So, people were not able to connect to DNS,” Ryan said.
But for people (like me) who didn’t know at the time it was a DNS issue, we rebooted. Internet service was out for hours. If we had known, we could have immediately switched to an alternative DNS resolver service, such as OpenDNS.com.
Download speeds were still sluggish for me Wednesday and today — I’m getting less than half the speed I was last week. Ryan says that has nothing to do with the recent outage.
Time Warner’s status site today still says there are outages in the L.A./O.C. region:
Related stories:
- Time Warner Cable’s speeds up Internet to 15 Mbps
- Time Warner Cable will stop billing for O.C. fire victims
- Feds to look closely at cable TV firms pricing, channel changes
- Time Warner’s new HD channels and why Costa Mesa, Tustin get them first
- Time Warner Cable’s new features finally coming to O.C.
- Time Warner still cleaning up cable merger mess in O.C.
- How to get cheaper cable TV from Time Warner Cable
- How to get cheaper cable TV in O.C., part 2
Tamara 'the Gadgetress' Chuang
Here's a list of TV/mobile companies helping consumers one tweet at a time. 
For those of us (probably very few) who have no television and rely on our internet link for news/data/entertainment, the multiple outages were quite annoying; almost as bad is the Time Warner autobot system you get when you call in to see what’s up. It would be nice if they could get more information out to their people so they can spread the word when stuff like this happens and people want to know what happened, at estimated time of repair… with all the recent outages they should also think about refunding part of their monthly $.
Tamara…I didn’t experience the outage, but did TWC say they’d give folks “credit” for the outage?? Wouldn’t hurt to call and ask..(not you, but affected users.)
My cable went out for several hours late on Monday night and it was a pain. When I called I got the recording that there was a “regional” outage and they were working on it. But I’m certainly not going to deal with calling TWC back and wading through their phone service purgatory for 30 minutes just to get a five dollar credit.
And I imagine that is just what TWC is hoping most other folks will do also.
Last time my cable went out (During the Olypmics opening ceremony no less!) I spent 20 minutes on the phone and finally was connected to a nice young lady who told me she was working from a TWC phone bank in Costa Rica. Costa Rica?!
It took three days for the picture on NBC and some other lower numbered channels to be restored. From Costa Rica.
I live in La Habra and our internet is down a lot. If we are lucky enough to have internet it’s really, really slow. If you call them and complain they will credit your account. We had a month where they owed us money on the bill.
My company, Caribia, Inc. is located in Stanton, CA. We have been without phone and fax service since Wednesday morning (12/10/08). Time Warner has told us that there is an area wide “power failure” and that it is being “worked on.” Our internet service has been fine (we have our internet/phone package through Time Warner). One of our customers who we do fulfillment for drove down from Beverly Hills yesterday to complain that they couldn’t fax us orders and when they phoned they got this recorded message,” The person you are trying to reach is not accepting calls at this time. Please try your call again later.” Apparently, I and my company are to blame for peoples’ inability to reach us! My customers are losing business! We are losing business! All because of my company’s refusal to accept calls! How about a more accurate recorded message acknowledging Time Warner’s system failure?
I called to inquire about the outage on Tuesday and asked about credit. They gave me $10 worth of credit. That’s about 4-5 days worth of credit for me.
I called to inquire about the outage on Tuesday and asked about credit. They gave me $10 credit. That’s about 6 days worth of credit based on what I pay for Internet. Not too shabby.
changing to fios as soon as its installed in our apartment complex. their service is ridiculous, and we told them as much. the indian man on the other end of the line was quite nice and embarrassed that his company is so horrible.
this happens too much for us. sure, no one’s perfect, but fios hasn’t given us a reason (yet) not to trust them.
I have my internet service through Time Warner. I am constantly bombarded with solicitors from their company trying to persuade me to add other services such as phone and cable. Their “bundle” packages are not financially sound for me. It’s frustrating enough when my internet doesn’t work, I can’t imagine if my internet, cable and phone service all went out. In addition to their poor service, my internet bill just went up $2.00 to $46.95 per month without any reason or notification!
Still down in Reseda. They said make an appointment, they can get someone out maybe Tuesday or Wednesday. Area wide problem, but they’ll send someone out to an individual house. The lady on the line couldn’t figure that out either. Down since Tuesday, and this is just the latest meltdown.
We haven’t had internet service since Monday. It’s now Saturday night. I’ve called TimeWarner at least five times. They keep saying it’ll be back up in a few hours. They sent someone out on Friday, but their system’s STILL down, he couldn’t get a signal. My work is severely negatively effected by this outage. Time Warner has been very polite and offered to refund for the time without service but at this point I feel like they should offer us an entire month free or I’m going back to DSL. It’s slower but at least I was never with out service for an entire week. I’m very dissatisfied with their service.
My service in the North SFV has also been out since Monday and support has been horrible, as is usually the case with Time Warner. Our neighbors have service but we don’t. We have had such bad service from TWC that we subscribed to the cheap DSL service to use as a backup for the 1-2 times a month TWC goes down.
I was able to get a phone number out of them for the advanced network support team and it is (888) 892-2253. I haven’t tried calling them yet because I doubt they can do anything either.
A followup to the post I just made… It turns out (888) 892-2253 is the main number for Time Warner. It’s no special “advanced support team.”
umm yea… time warner is always down… ALWAYS.
Our Time-Warner cable was out from Wed. Dec 10 through Saturday, Dec 13. We are in Huntington Beach. We still could not log onto the Internet as we have AOL bundled with TWC and now the AOL/TWC system is down. Starting Saturday, AOL techs said they were changing a switch and it would take 6 to 10 hours. I got the same story Sunday and Monday. Still nothing today, Tuesday, Dec. 16. I am now using dial-up to get into my AOL account which is very SLOW. What a waste of time fooling with this………
Thanks all who continue to post problems with Time Warner. I read every comment — no matter when they come in. Please continue to keep me posted and feel free to email me at thegadgetress@ocregister.com with detailed complaints. — Gadgetress
I am in Santa Clartia (Saugus) and have been without TW internet since Tuesday night (yep, one full week). Any time I have called TW they read the exact same thing from a manuel whether it answers my questions or not.
I am in Los Alamitos and am in the same boat as Lala. I’ve been evaluating options for new service. My connection is through AOL. Is that the same as others or is this a Road Runner problem, too?
FYI: I just updated this post a big. Read “Is Time Warner’s Internet outage really fixed?”
Specific to the AOL Internet issue, Time Warner says this is an individual problem. But at least two people have mentioned it. Anyone else?
I still do not have an internet connection (be a week tomorrow). I spoke with an AOL tech today and got the same story: just be patient as our people are working the issue. He also mentioned that TWC would like to get rid of the TWC/AOL bundles for whatever reason. Suggested fix it option is to pay TWC for cable and Road Runner, then AOL for their services separately, if needed. Seems AOL is only $11 or so, according to their tech. Not sure what TWC will charge for cable and Internet access via Road Runner. Probably less than the bundle, but haven’t checked. Annoying……..
I called TWC early this morning to ask about the outage, and to get a credit on my account. The tech said the outage didn’t exist in my area and that my line was fine. How that can be possible when to this day I am still getting connection reset and page cannot be displayed errors has me wondering. For now, I have switched DNS servers to alleviate the issue.
There is a $34.99/mo deal for Road Runner right now for 12 mo contract, so that is what I am looking at. But I wanted to make sure that the problem is the AOL connection to TWC and not TWC itself somehow.
FYI, I had TWC tech come to the house last Saturday to check my connection and his equipment indicated the TWC was fine (after being down for 4 days. At least they said it was down when I called the TWC “help” line). The TWC tech called his office from my house and they said AOL system that is bundled with the TWC system was now down. Been the case since Saturday when the tech was here. Think I pay $54 for TWC/AOL a month. I am now using dial-up, as I said earlier, which is more or less free. But, jeez it’s slow…….. I’ll call AOL again tomorrow morning if I still can’t get on the Broadband and see what the latest story is. Maybe Verizon is down and that’s causing the problem……..
Follow Up: I just did a speed test (it’s 10:18pm Tuesday night) and found my download speed is only 1/3 what it was prior to the outage. So, just because the service is back up, doesn’t mean the problem has been completely fixed. I’ll give them until tomorrow after to get my speed back to what I am paying for.
Finally gave up! Still couldn’t get on the Internet. I had AOL cancel the AOL/Time-Warner bundle we had and create a separate AOL account. Called TWC and had them change our Broadband to allow direct Internet access, i.e. without using AOL. Works great………so far. I went for the mid-range cost package and seems to be faster than the AOL/TWC bundle package we had before. One thing for sure, tis much faster than dial-up. Best of luck to all still having problems.
P.S. The separate AOL and TWC bill is now less than the original bundle package……
Does this means the on-going outage only affects AOL/TWC bundle customers?
My broadband has been down for almost a week. AOL and TWC pointing fingers at each other. Several calls to each and it’s a different story each time. TWC sent a tech out on Sunday and he rewired, boosted the signal and swapped out the modem. He confirmed all is okay on our end, but we still can’t get broadband to work. I called TWC last night and insisted on talking to a supervisor. I waited for over an hour for a supervisor to come on the line; CSR finally came on and said she would have supervisor return call (I’m still waiting). I’m not anxious to switch to DSL. Anybody have any experience with satellite?
Lynn,
We dropped Time Warner internet in 2007 because of many of the same problems you have described, we were having time and time again shortly after our area (Brea) was converted from Adelphia’s network over to Time Warner. Lot’s of finger pointing. We gave Time Warner the finger for their horrible internet service.
In 2007, we switched to AT&T’s DSL service. Earlier this year when we dropped our AT&T local phone service, we switched to AT&T’s “naked” DSL (DSL without local phone service).
So far, we have not experienced any outages to speak of, but from tips we have learned from the Gadgetress (and others) we do use Open DNS. AT&T did experience an outage earlier this year with the DNS servers, but ours was running fine. I’m assuming it was because of Open DNS.
I know switiching providers is a hassle and we are not a young couple. But, we sure have learned a lot from these boards. We came across some great suggestions on how to dump those providers who proivide poor and inconsistent service, and look for ways to reduce your overall communications bill(s) with services from different providers (I realize each person has different service requirements and programming needs).
Not only have we un-bundled, but we are SAVING money by un-bundling and fighting back by purchasing services that meet our needs to fight these over the top price increases! No big deal to go on-line and pay an extra bill or two from an additional provider. Bill pay from our credit union is free.
2009…The Year of Un-Bundling!!!