Did You Lose Your Internet This Morning? You Weren't the Only One

Usually Internet deaths are localized issues, like a tree falling on a cable line or your modem not working. But this morning, the Internet died for many customers across the country and Time Warner Cable seems to be taking ownership.

The problem is apparently resolved and seems short-lived, but customers are being told to connect again.

According to Time Warner Cable's website, the company serves high speed data services to about 9.7 million residential and commercial customers. According to Business Insider, outages were reported in Washington D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco, Raleigh, N.C., Dallas and New York so far. Business Insider also reports that the outage flashed off for about 30 seconds.

Silicon reports that some Internet service providers in the United Kingdom were also affected and as to what happened:

Several of the affected companies blamed the downtime on a problem with the firmware in Juniper Network routers.

"This outage has affected other networks running Juniper routers with the majority of them seeing their devices core dump and reload," affected ISP Phyber Communications said.

The problems at several of the ISPs appear to stem from the Juniper routers being reset at tier one network provider Level3, which routes internet traffic between the US, the UK and the rest of the world.

"Shortly after 9am ET today, Level 3's network experienced several outages across North America and Europe relating to some of the routers on our network," Level3 said.

"Our technicians worked quickly to bring systems back online. At this time, all connection issues have been resolved, and we are working hard with our equipment vendors to determine the exact cause of the outage and ensure all systems are stable."

The Twittersphere was hot on the story this morning with one report of the outage lasting 20 minutes. There is also speculation that other Internet service providers were affected as well, but this has not yet been confirmed.

CNET reports that this trouble, which apparently hit sometime after 6 a.m. Pacific Time, is not the first of late for Time Warner Cable:

A couple weeks ago, my Time Warner Cable Internet service went down for several minutes. Upon calling the company, I was told I needed to call back due to a large number of customers calling for support. A subsequent Twitter search at the time revealed that many people were without service both in my area and outside of it. Like today's outage, that issue was quickly resolved.

CNET also suggests other providers could be involved in an outage, stating that RCN customers in Boston and Philadelphia were also experiencing Internet problems around the same time, but RCN has not yet publicly confirmed or denied an outage either way.

Stay tuned: This story will be updated as we get more information.

This story has been updated since its original posting to include more details at 1:07.