Millions of Time Warner (News 
- Alert) customers across the nation were unable to connect to the Web for a brief period of time on Monday morning following a massive Internet outage.
"We appear to be recovering from a large but brief Internet outage affecting most of our service areas," the company confirmed on Twitter (News - Alert). "Please attempt to connect again."
Judging by various tweets from users, the outage occurred just after 9 a.m. EST and lasted for anywhere between 30 seconds and 20 minutes. While the length of the outage wasn't all that substantial, the reach seemed to be all-encompassing.
Business Insider confirmed outages in most every major U.S. city, including New York, Los Angeles, Washington D.C. and San Francisco. With 9.7 million residential high-speed Internet customers, Time Warner alienated a large group of users, at least for a short period of time.
What is more, at least one customer reported that they received a strange error message after calling in to Time Warner's customer service department. It seems that the company's whole system may have collapsed.
CNET's Don Reisinger says that today's brief outage may not have been the only one for Time Warner in the last few weeks, even though it is the first that they have acknowledged. As a Time Warner customer himself, Reisinger suffered an outage last month and couldn't get through to customer service because the company was experiencing a large number of calls. After doing a quick Twitter search, he found that customers in his area and across the country were complaining about similar problems.
Although these reports are far from substantiated, some Twitter users have claimed that Time Warner was not the only provider to suffer a brief outage this morning. RCN (News - Alert) customers also apparently experienced some connection problems, and some other users are claiming that the Internet turned off for most everybody for at least a few seconds.
Either way, it is a bit strange to see an outage affect customers nationwide, as Internet problems are usually localized. Frankly, I'm not even sure how a nationwide collapse could occur. Time Warner has yet to offer up any details. Stay tuned for updates from TMC (News - Alert).
Beecher Tuttle is a TMCnet contributor. He has extensive experience writing and editing for print publications and online news websites. He has specialized in a variety of industries, including health care technology, politics and education. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by Rich Steeves
