Hurricane blamed for Internet outage
By Kathy McCarty
Staff Writer
Hurricane Irene may be history, but her effects are still being felt in various ways, including Wednesday’s loss of Internet, telephone and cable service to thousands of Time Warner Cable customers in Maine and other parts of New England.
Company officials cited damage resulting from the hurricane as the reason for the disruption in services.
“At about 2:30 p.m. on Aug. 31, Time Warner Cable Network, serving about 350,000 customers in New England was damaged by continued flooding caused by Hurricane Irene. All high-speed Internet and digital phone customers lost service and many video channels were also impacted,” said Andrew Russell, Time Warner Cable’s manager of communications for New England.
Those affected by the outage included municipal offices, businesses and residential customers.
“We thought it was just our office but found all city departments were offline Wednesday afternoon,” said Penny Anderson, administrative assistant in the Code Enforcement Office in Presque Isle.
Crews performed repairs and had service restored later that day.
“As of 6:10 p.m., all services were restored to customers affected by this issue,” said Russell. “We appreciate customers’ patience during this service interruption.”