12m Households Lose Internet Connection Due To Service Outage In US

Internet service was down for millions of Americans on Wednesday morning after cable company Time Warner suffered a major outage.

The company, which has almost 12 million broadband subscribers nationwide, has acknowledged the fault, and says it is "working to restore services to all areas", but has no estimated time of restoration.

The outage appears to have started around 6am ET, and affected users besieged the helplines and social media accounts of the firm, which declared an operating income of $1.1bn in the 2nd quarter of 2014.

By 8.30am ET, the company told customers its services "were starting to be restored".

On Tuesday, Reuters reported that Time Warner Cable paid $1.1m to resolve an investigation from the Federal Communications Commission that found the provider did not properly report multiple network outages.

"TWC (Time Warner Cable) failed to file a substantial number of reports with respect to a series of reportable wireline and Voice Over Internet Protocol network outages," the FCC's report read.

"TWC admits that its failure to timely file the required network outage reports violated the commission's rules."

The Guardian