twcout_120Insomniacs and early risers found themselves without Internet Wednesday as Time Warner Cable scrambled to fix a problem that was triggered by workers during routine maintenance.  Starting around 3am EDT reports began streaming in to the company complaining of outages.  At around 7am the number of reports peaked at nearly 10,000, according to the monitoring site downdetector.com.  In Lansing service was restored around 7:30am.

"At 4:30am ET this morning during our routine network maintenance, an issue with our Internet backbone created disruption with our Internet and On Demand services," a statement from the company said. "As of 6:00am ET services were largely restored as updates continue to bring all customers back online."

twcout_mapUsers used a phone app from downdetector.com to monitor the outages Wednesday.

Time Warner Cable has 11.4 million U.S. subscribers.  Many of them used cell phones to access Twitter, where the company was overwhelmed with tweets about the outage from subscribers all over the country.  After posting several tweets saying they were aware of problems in various localities, one tweet around 7:30 said further tweets were being delayed while TCWC worked to restore service. 

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By 10:30am the company tweeted, "Services should be restored for all customers; our apologies for the interruption. If you're still having issues, please let us know."

By 7:30 Lansing users began reporting their connections were coming back, though momentary intermittent outages continued to plague local users throughout the day.

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