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.
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 …
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.
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...
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!
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.