Charter Suffers Internet Outage

Charter Communications told the Associated Press late Saturday that the company was aware of Internet outages across the cable company's service areas.

A Charter spokeswoman, according to AP, said the problems were "intermittent throughout our footprint" and that the cause was unknown. Multichannel News has contacted Charter seeking an update.

Update: Charter issued a statement Sunday that services have been restored.

"Charter Communications reports services have been restored following an Internet outage that affected multiple markets across its operating area on August 23. Technical teams are monitoring the network closely and continue to investigate the cause of the issue," Charter said in a statement.

Charter customers complained about the problems on social media Saturday, including complaints that Charter had not publicly notified customers via outlets such as Twitter and the MSO's Facebook page. Staci D. Kramer, the technology writer who lives in the St. Louis area, was one of those commenting on the outage. She told Multichannel News on Sunday, via Twitter, that her Charter broadband service went out around 4 p.m. Saturday, came back on intermittently around midnight then was up steadily by 4:30 a.m. Sunday.

Twitter commenters using the #charteroutage hashtag described it as a nationwide outage lasting 15 hours or more. Some said they were able to restore service by making an adjustment related to their Domain Name Server setting.

Charter ended the second quarter of 2014 with 4.56 million high-speed Internet subscribers.

--Multichannel News technology editor Jeff Baumgartner contributed to this report.

Kent Gibbons

Kent has been a journalist, writer and editor at Multichannel News since 1994 and with Broadcasting+Cable since 2010. He is a good point of contact for anything editorial at the publications and for Nexttv.com. Before joining Multichannel News he had been a newspaper reporter with publications including The Washington Times, The Poughkeepsie (N.Y.) Journal and North County News.