VILLAIN or HERO? A Vandal Cuts Off Internet for Thousands of New Yorkers
Credit to Author: Samantha Cole| Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2017 17:55:06 +0000
Something sinister happened in Brooklyn this morning.
Spectrum, the company Time Warner Cable and Charter Communications’ rebranded to when they merged last year experienced an outage that impacted a portion Brooklyn Friday. It’s difficult to say where the outage occurred beyond this tweet, because they won’t tell me. They did say, however, that “thousands” of people lost service.
John Bonomo, a spokesperson for Charter Communications, the company that owns Time Warner and its fiber optic cables, sent me this statement:
“Vandalism of Charter’s fiber-optic network in Brooklyn early this morning has resulted in thousands of customers there losing service. Our repair crews have been working tirelessly I’m [sic] the past several hours to restore service as quickly as possible. We appreciate our customers’ patience as we do. We are also working with the NYPD on an investigation of this latest round of criminal destruction of our network.”
I called the cops to try to find out more. I tried the 90th Precinct in Williamsburg, where the outage appeared to be centered. There was no answer to any of the extensions I tried. I can only assume they’re busy serving up justice on the trail of this “criminal destruction.”
After the cops, I called the Time Warner customer service switchboard (after attempting to reach their press contacts directly, with no success) and eventually spoke with a representative who could tell me very little about the issue. There were several areas in Brooklyn that were affected she said, but wouldn’t divulge specific regions. The dispatch team was on location in the borough, she said, but she wouldn’t tell me where. She could tell me, however, that a fiber line was cut, and that Time Warner TV, phone and Internet were all impacted.
This isn’t the first time vandalism has affected Time Warner’s internet service. Employees went on months-long strike in March of this year, during which fiber cables were cut 106 times total in the Spectrum network, according to ABC 7, impacting tens of thousands of customers in New York City.
This is the company that brought you a “years-long ‘systematic scheme’ to defraud and mislead consumers by promising internet service that the company knew it could not deliver.” New Yorkers hate Time Warner so much, it brings them together.