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Time Warner Cable Blames “Maintenance” for Nationwide Internet Outage (UPDATED)

Broadband goes out for a big chunk of the U.S., but it’s coming back now.

Shutterstock/Sarah Frier Photography
Peter Kafka
Peter Kafka covered media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.

It wasn’t just you. Time Warner Cable says its Internet service was knocked out nationwide this morning. Here’s a statement from the company:

“At 430am ET this morning during our routine network maintenance, an issue with our Internet backbone created disruption with our Internet and On Demand services. As of 6am ET services were largely restored as updates continue to bring all customers back online.”

(UPDATE: 12 hours later, Time Warner Cable has sent out a new, more detailed statement: “During an overnight network maintenance activity in which we were managing IP addresses, an erroneous configuration was propagated throughout our national backbone, resulting in a network outage. We immediately identified and corrected the root cause of the issue and restored service by 7:30am ET. We apologize for any inconvenience this caused our customers. A failure of this size is very serious and we are taking the necessary steps to improve our processes with the objective of making sure this doesn’t happen again.”)

The company is the second-biggest cable TV and broadband provider in the country, with 15 million customers. Comcast*, the country’s biggest cable TV company, is trying to convince lawmakers to let it buy Time Warner Cable.

* Comcast owns NBCUniversal, which is an investor in Re/code.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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