Time Warner Cable customers across the country lost internet access this morning

Thousands — and perhaps millions — of Americans found themselves without internet access at home this morning. Time Warner Cable is the nation's second-largest cable provider, with about 12 million subscribers.

As of about 8am this morning, Eastern time, the outage was affecting customers across the country:

(Downdetector.com via Mashable)

Time Warner Cable says it's working on the problem but hasn't given a specific ETA for completing its work:

We're working to restore services to all areas as quickly as possible; no ETR. Tweets will be delayed while this is addressed.

— TWC Help (@TWC_Help) August 27, 2014

In the 20th Century, the monopoly telephone provider AT&T famously achieved 99.999 percent reliability, which translates to about 5 minutes of downtime per year. Today's outage means that Time Warner Cable isn't going to come close to that level of reliability this year. And few consumer broadband providers have managed to make their internet services as reliable as traditional telephone service was decades ago.

TWC is currently seeking to merge with the nation's number one cable provider, Comcast.

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