We know when your Internet goes down it is absolutely maddening and makes you want to do this —
(Via NBC / "Parks & Recreation")
Now take that frustration and multiply it by about 11 million.
Time Warner Cable's Internet service went down across the nation Tuesday, affecting the estimated 11 - 15 million customers and businesses that subscribe to it.
The outage occurred around 4:30 a.m. ET. By 6 a.m., service was restored to a large portion of customers according to the the company. Then, around 10:30 a.m., Time Warner announced on Twitter that service should be restored to everyone.
DownDetector.com, a service that tracks issues and outages for a variety of technological services, showed a significant spike in reported problems around the 5 a.m. mark. According to the site, 94% of reported problems were due to Internet service.
Time Warner issued a statement to several media outlets reading, "During our routine network maintenance, an issue with our Internet backbone created disruption with our Internet and On Demand services."
And either while waiting painstaking hours for Internet to come back or just after getting it restored, the masses let Time Warner know on Twitter they weren't too happy.
There's no real 'good' time to have a widespread company failure, but this one comes at an exceptionally bad time.
Time Warner and Comcast are currently in the midst of a merger, agreed upon by the two sides back in February. Now, all they need is approval from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
But, many argue combining the two largest cable operators would make it into a monopoly, which could result in steeper prices and less than premium service.
Tuesday, Netflix tossed its own hat into the ring in the fight against that merger, saying "the proposed merger would significantly strengthen the harms to consumers and to Internet content distributors." (Video via Netflix)
The FCC is still investigating the terms of the merger and has not yet released a date on when a ruling could be made.
This video contains images from erikkristensen / CC BY 2.0 and eviemaedavid / CC BY NC ND 2.0
