back to article Time Warner Cable customers SQUEAL as US network goes offline

Time Warner Cable is staggering back to its feet after wrestling with a major network outage that hit a number of big cities in the US on both the East and West Coast of the country this morning. A spike in users being kicked offline was reported by Down Detector around six hours ago. Most Americans who are Time Warner Cable …

  1. unitron

    They aren't very big on redundancy...

    ...and routing around damage.

    A few years ago my entire county was out, internet and cable, because of a single cut cable two counties over.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: They aren't very big on redundancy...

      Thankfully, this will change once the merger gets rubber stamped, and all will be sunshine and lollipops, forever, whatever, amen.

      1. R Laval
        Coat

        Re: They aren't very big on redundancy...

        Do I hear a shout of "Taxi!" there? :-)

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: They aren't very big on redundancy...

      "They aren't very big on redundancy... "

      The market has spoken. The market wants cheap, not reliable.

      1. Fatman

        Re: They aren't very big on redundancy...

        The market executive suite has spoken. The market executive suite wants cheap, not reliable more money for the executive bonus pool.

        FTFY!

  2. Gene Cash Silver badge
    Pint

    Thanks El Reg

    The Yahoo! story had basically the entire continental US out, which I knew wasn't true because I'm a customer in central Florida.

    A beer for Kelly.

    1. Dave Hilling

      Re: Thanks El Reg

      mine wasnt listed as being out on that map though.... and it was.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The 512k routing limit?

    Just a thought

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Too many people watching Netflix, that's why they gotta get rid of Net neutrality and get all these video, music, and high usage sites to pay them so this doesn't happen again.

  5. ItsNotMe
    WTF?

    So tell me...

    ...if their system was tits-up...how were their customers getting their apologetic messages from Twatter?

    1. Preston Munchensonton
      Coat

      Re: So tell me...

      Same way that most of them get them throughout the day: via their mobes. Personally, I would expect that is the vast majority, maybe even more than 90% (though just a guess).

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: So tell me...

        Most of the cable companies bought spectrum from the FCC to offer their own mobile service. They have since sold it, but imagine if they did deploy it. Then customers would have no Internet service at home and their mobile would have been dead as well.

  6. i like crisps
    Black Helicopters

    DIE HARD 4.0

    This is how it started!

  7. earl grey
    Stop

    "blighting the telco"

    Dear el Reg,

    Please stop referring to the cable companies in the US as "telco". They are not. They may be ISPs; but beside that are primarily cable (TV) providers and their "telephony" services do not approach those of the traditional telephone providers.

    Thank you.

    1. ecofeco Silver badge

      Re: "blighting the telco"

      You beat me to it.

      Upvoted.

    2. CommonTator
      Facepalm

      Re: "blighting the telco"

      Actually, I just happened to lookup Telecom in relation to the FCC changing cable companies and other ISP's classification. Sure enough Telecommunication is communication of data, not just phone calls, and nothing specifically about over phone lines. In fact, it refers to radio waves or whatever technical means of communication. And how does Telecommunication relate to Telco? Well, I looked up Telco, and sure enough it started as Telephone Company, but is also now defined as Telecommunications. As such, it's interesting that the FCC has hesitated to define ISP's as telecommunications for their classification system which allows them more power to get the ISP's to honor Net Neutrality and quit throttling traffic.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Whos routers ard they using? Alu, huawei, cisco or juniper? I for one cannot believe that they have no redundancy at layer 2.5 of their core. So I expect this to be a label switching router problem

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      if you believe their job postings

      They're running a mix of Cisco and Juniper, although the comment above about Linksys and Buffalo got me laughing. On the other hand, as a Comcast victim, I can tell you their network has been yo-yoing here northeast of Atlanta for a week.

      edited because I can't tell Buffalo and NetGear apart...

      edited again because apparently I can't tell above from below, either...

  9. channel extended
    WTF?

    The routers in question-

    Perhaps they are using Linksys or Buffalo?

    1. IglooDude

      Re: The routers in question-

      I was going to say Rosewill...

    2. James O'Shea

      Re: The routers in question-

      Linksys and Buffalo are both too reliable and too expensive. (though things are changing for Linksys thanks to a recent change in ownership; they may merely be too expensive now.) Undoubtably TWC is using Belkin routers.

  10. Herbert Meyer

    Approve the merger and nobody gets hurt.

    This is just a little taste of what will happen if the TWC-Comcast is not approved. They have ways of dealing with puny little regulators. And lots and lots of hostages.

  11. StimuliC

    Don't know what the big hairy deal was!

    Time Warner service regularly goes out. They normally cycle the power on and off around their network to save money. Just some idiot screwed up and turned all the network systems off all over the country in one go instead of an hour here, then an hour there and so on.

    He got so busted, they put him on customer retention duty for the rest of the year!

  12. AustinTX

    It was a DNS issue, not a general routing issue.

    It hit us here in Austin TX. It looked like a DNS outage… but I was using Google DNS. Routing was NOT down… I could still access a selection of web servers by direct IP address, and ping and traceroute. Rebooted my modem and router repeatedly. Modem acquired a link quickly, and status page showed it had a valid configuration. Modem’s signal strength dropped from the usual minus-8-ish to minus-6-ish dBmV. Router acquired IP and WAN domain name effortlessly.

    I tried OpenDNS, Earthlink, Dell, and some other public DNS servers I have in a list, but they didn’t work either. All timed out. I didn’t know what TWC’s DNS servers were, so I zeroed them out in my router config, then rebooted. Well, DHCP picked up TWC's DNS servers like nothing was wrong. STILL had no working DNS resolution! And I could still access websites by direct IP address. I was also still receiving mail and web traffic to my own servers, though well below usual levels. The email server was rejecting all mail though, since it couldn’t verify the sender’s domain names.

    Exhausted, I gave up and went to bed. Everything was simply working again when I got up.

    The evidence suggests that TWC decided to *filter* DNS traffic, possibly even to aggregate and reroute all of it, and they screwed the pooch. I can’t think of any legitimate reason they’d need to do this. I think I’m going to go back to running my own DNS server. Not much I can do about state-redirected DNS traffic other than tunnel it through a VPN perhaps.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: It was a DNS issue, not a general routing issue.

      I can only smile that I decided to up-bird (is that in the OED?) them and pay for a VPN account several years ago.

  13. Kruzman

    Yep, after a little testing I found that their DNS servers could only resolve internal addresses, nothing external.

  14. Levente Szileszky

    Time Warner Cable, the archetype of a poorly-run, dirt-cheap network of a profit-greedy company.....

    ...and that's what you get ^10 if they will be allowed to merge with Comcast, the worst of all.

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