Time-Warner Internet, Phone Services Online After Outage

Los Angeles - 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 Los Angeles, Orange County, the Coachella Valley and San Diego.

Time-Warner Cable engineers said they found a malfunctioning piece of equipment at an undisclosed location "outside the state of California" and at about 1 p.m. began reprogramming routers to avoid the bottleneck, said company spokesman Jim Gordon. Repairs began to take effect in some locations immediately, and the entire system should be functioning normally by midafternoon, he said.

Gordon said the data interruption, which he said was intermittent, also cut telephone service for customers who use a Time-Warner cable or fiber line for bundled Time-Warner dial-tone phone service. VOIP service like Skype or Vonage was also affected.

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

The company has concentrations of customers in Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties, and the Coachella Valley, and all were affected today, Gordon said. Cable television service provided by the same company did not appear to be affected.

Customers were urged by the company during the outage today not to unplug their modems to try to reboot them.

"We know that's unusual, because normally we tell people that the first step they should take in an outage is `unplug and reboot'," Gordon said. "But in this case, unplugging a modem may result in total loss of service," he said.

At midafternoon, and as repaired software rolled out across the company's routers, Gordon said modems would automatically detected service and reboot. Customers could again reset their modems by unplugging them, he said, without risk of disconnecting from a malfunctioning network.

In the morning hours, customer service workers in California told customers 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.