Thousands of Southern California homes and businesses were without Internet service for more than six hours Sunday as Time Warner tried to repair region-wide outages.
The problem began as slow service overnight, but then turned into a complete breakdown by 6 a.m.
Engineers found a malfunctioning piece of equipment outside of California, and began reprogramming routers to avoid the bottleneck at about 1 p.m, according to Time Warner spokesman Jim Gordon. He expected the network to be completely up and running by midafternoon.
The data issues also affected people who get their telephone service through Time Warner, Gordon said. Cable service provided by the company did not seem to be affected.
In the morning, customer service representatives told customers the entire network was down. "We've been calling people out of bed to fix this, and we're getting calls from everywhere," one worker told City News Service.
There has not been a link established between the California outages and Hurricane Irene on the East Coast, Gordon said.
Time Warner is one of the providers for cable in Redondo Beach.
City News Service contributed to this report.
