The Tiniest Mistake May Have Led to Nationwide Time Warner Cable Outage

An extra zero or maybe a misplaced period - that's how small the error could be that led to a new nationwide Internet outage for Time Warner Cable customers.

TWC announced on Wednesday evening that its recent issues were due to a single mistake. The company's statement is full of jargon, but take a look for yourself:

During an overnight network maintenance activity in which we were managing IP addresses, an erroneous configuration was propagated throughout our national backbone, resulting in a network outage. We immediately identified and corrected the root cause of the issue and restored service by 7:30 a.m. ET. We apologize for any inconvenience this caused our customers. A failure of this size is very serious and we are taking the necessary steps to improve our processes with the objective of making sure this doesn't happen again.

Here's what we know: Time Warner Cable was performing maintenance on its system. At some point, an IP address - a number that identifies a different device on a network - was changed that ended up causing a major problem.

Dan Rayburn, an analyst at Frost & Sullivan, likened IP addressed to home addresses. If someone at Time Warner Cable accidentally entered the wrong IP address in an important place, it could end up causing a major outage like the one seen this week by trying to send data to the wrong device or even one that does not exist.

'Let's say you're having a party and everybody is coming to your house and you live at 10 Main Street, but you accidentally told everybody you live at 100 Main Street,' he said.

Rayburn said it could be as simple as a worker accidentally mistyping an IP address that then ends up affecting the entire system.

TWC acknowledged that the outage was due to an internal error and was not the work of an outside actor.

It is important to note that no reports suggest the outage affected customers outside of the TWC network. The U.S. Internet infrastructure is complex, with numerous companies that provide a variety of services such as connectivity, website hosting, and content delivery.

TWC is what is known as a ' last mile' provider, connecting users to the broader Internet.

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