What he could not say was why it happened. Time Warner engineers are investigating that, he said.
“We’re still digging in to find the root cause of what the issue was,” Pedelty said. “But we were able to re-route traffic, our Internet traffic and our on-demand service traffic.”
Asked if it was possible the company’s servers were hacked, he said, “We’re looking into that. I’m not going to speculate on what may or may not have happened. If that were the case, we will report that.”
Time Warner Cable has 2.13 million customers in Ohio, including 630,000 in southwest Ohio. The company is southwest Ohio’s largest cable provider and employs 1,900 workers in the region.
Pedelty could not say why Ohio, Kentucky and parts of Wisconsin were affected. He also could not give an exact number of customers affected.
“It would be all of our customers in Green Bay, Milwaukee … Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Louisville, Lexington. Primarily, our Midwest customers,” he said.
DownDetector.com — a Netherlands-based website that tracks Internet service outages worldwide — ranked the Time Warner Cable outage as No. 1 among its top 10 service outages of the week. The site registers user complaints and reports about service interruptions, sifting through tweets, direct report to its website and other sources.
DownDetector.com co-founder Tom Sanders said the outage was the worst Time Warner Cable interruption in terms of reports registered to his site. The outage resulted in 16,160 reports over just 15 minutes at its height, he said.
“That’s definitely big,” Sanders said.
Normally, the site registers about 6,000 reports per hour worldwide, he said.
“This was by far the biggest yesterday (Monday),” Sanders said.
Asked if outages of this sort were common problems for Time Warner, he said the company does not seem to do worse than Comcast or other domestic competitors.
Jennie Freiberger of Dayton said the intermittent service impacted her online shopping plans
“I was planning to do a lot for us. I don’t like shopping crowds,” Freiberger said.
Thomas Skill, University of Dayton associate provost and chief information officer, said the outage may point to a need to invest in network infrastructure and network “redundancies” that back up customers when there are failures. Networks today are built for “an average load,” not necessarily a day where everyone is shopping online at once, he said.
“You have a network out there that really doesn’t have a lot of redundancy in it,” Skill said.
He feels service providers like Time Warner don’t necessarily believe there’s a profitable return for them to build that redundancy in; they don’t believe customers will likely pay for the extra costs it takes to have a “resilient network.”
“You have a connected world out there,” Skill said.”When you put critical devices and critical services on that connected world, the demand is that you make it resilient.”
Pedelty said Time Warner has spent “tens of millions” in the Midwest over the past couple of years to strengthen its network and continues to invest.
“We have spent a great deal of resources to enhance our network,” Pedelty said.
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