Internet outage spurs nationwide frustration

It was the outage heard coast to coast and a big part of the problem was — surprise– Time Warner Cable.

While internet users across the country suffered withdrawal from the grid, Time Warner Cable tweeted, “We appear to be recovering from a large but brief internet outage affecting most of our service areas.”

As much as we would love to pint the finger at Time Warner because — let’s be honest — the company is often the bane of our technological existence, it turns out it wasn’t alone in this screw-up. The Atlantic Wire reports that RCN and Blackberry users also complained of service interruptions today.

The real source of the problem may have been Level3, a tier one network that is responsible for a large portion of the internet. Level3 issued this statement about the incident:

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

Though we have little control over the powers that be, we pray they get their acts together quickly. Don’t they know we have Facebook statuses to update?!