Western New York recovering after major internet outage

Residents and businesses in Buffalo, New York and the surrounding Western New York area are recovering after an internet outage occurred during the weekend. Customers of Time Warner Cable reported losing their service around 4:30 a.m. on Sunday. Many customers could not connect to the internet, had a connection but slow speeds, or had issues accessing "secure web pages such as MSN/Hotmail, Yahoo, eBay, Google and MySpace.com," according to a recorded message on Time Warner's customer service line.

The issues started to occur when Time Warner began the final system switch from the former provider, Adelphia Cable's PowerLink to Time Warner's Road Runner high speed internet. As part of the switch over, many customers were assigned new IP addresses, which is believed to have caused many of the issues with not being able to connect to the internet.

Service should have been restored today, said a spokesperson for Time Warner, but many customers are still experiencing issues. Time Warner said that by shutting down your computer and modem, unplugging them both for several minutes, then rebooting them, should fix the issues customers have.

Despite the number of people experiencing the issues, Time Warner says that "there should not have been too much disturbance of the system. [The outage] certainly got a lot of people's attention on our end," said Robin Wolfgang, a spokeswoman for Time Warner.

If you still experience issues, Time Warner asks that you call their customer service line at 1-888-683-1000. It is not known when all service will be fixed, but some customers report that when calling Time Warner, the service agent says that some customers may not have service restored for at least 3 to 5 days.

Time Warner services about 120,000 customers in Western New York and nearly all of them were affected in one form or another, but an exact number of the affected is not yet known. Cable TV service was not affected.