CLEVELAND — Wednesday morning, 11.4 million people had no access to the Internet access after Time Warner Cable experienced an issue that took down its entire service backbone.
RELATED: Time Warner Cable online after widespread Net outage
Television and phone services were unaffected but complaints quickly showed up on social media with many people bashing TWC, who ranks last in many customer satisfaction surveys.
Time Warner sent a tweet in the hours following the outage apologizing for the service interruption. But the damage was already done.
On Facebook, Dan Wheller said, “Time Warner is horrible, always something not working.”
Ken Foti added, “Mine goes out daily.”
“Glad I got rid of Time Warner,” said Paul, a former customer.
So how did Time Warner drop the ball?
Everyone connects to the Internet through an Internet service provider, or ISP, such as Time Warner, AT&T or even using your smartphone.
During “scheduled maintenance,” Time Warner’s entire network went down, meaning all of the homes that connect to the Internet through Time Warner were cut off.
And if the proposed merger with Comcast was done, the situation could have been a lot worse — as Comcast and TWC are the dominant ISP’s here in the states.
So what can you do if you want to ditch cable or find another ISP?
We’ve found an interactive website that allows you to lookup your address. It’s called ConnectOhio.org
Connect Ohio’s is a non-profit organization working to bring the benefits of universal broadband to Ohio.
You can use the interactive map tool by following this link: http://bit.ly/1pj2cRZ
Follow WKYC’s Brandon Simmons on Twitter: @216Brandon