Time Warner: Power outage caused interruption in cable service

Published 12:00 am Tuesday, December 1, 2009

By Mark Wineka
mwineka@salisburypost.com
So what happened to Jack Bauer in Monday’s night’s episode of “24”?
What funky dream did Allison have in “Medium”?
Did the “Closer” close things out?
Those were some of the questions hanging in the air this morning among some 6,500 Time Warner Cable subscribers in the company’s Salisbury service area.
At 9:24 p.m., all the Time Warner channels (except local feeds) went into freeze frame for close to two hours.
Whatever was on a cable channel at the time of a Duke Energy power outage remained locked on that channel during the service interruption.
Melissa Buscher, director of media relations for Time Warner Cable in the Carolinas, said the service interruption occurred when power was lost to Time Warner’s main service site in Salisbury.
Buscher said when outages to the site occur, backup generators are supposed to kick in, but those generators did not work Monday night.
It took until about 11:30 p.m. for the generator problem to be fixed, she said. During the restoration efforts, customers may have received a signal for awhile but then lost it again.
Only the subscribers served from the Salisbury station were affected.
Time Warner Cable’s Carolina Region provides video, Internet and telephone services to more than two million customers in 442 cities and towns across North and South Carolina.