Time Warner Cable hit by service outage for almost two hours

Time Warner Cable Inc the second-largest U.S. cable operator, experienced a major network outage early Wednesday morning that shut down Internet services for almost two hours, the company said.

The outage, which the company said was caused by routine network maintenance, affected 2 percent of the routed networks in the United States, according to Renesys, a U.S. firm that monitors global Internet activity.

It was not known how many customers lost Internet service or cable television service.

Time Warner Cable provides Internet services to about 11 million customers nationwide. Spokesman Bobby Amirshahi said the outage occurred at around 4:30 a.m. EDT (0830 GMT), with services "largely restored" at around 6 a.m. EDT. A majority of customers were back online by the time of the statement, around 8 a.m. EDT, he said.

"During our routine network maintenance, an issue with our Internet backbone created disruption with our Internet and On Demand services," he said.

The company did not elaborate further on the cause of the disruption.

The outage came one day after the company agreed to pay $1.1 million to U.S. regulators who found the company did not did not file all the proper paperwork to report multiple network outages last year.

The Federal Communications Commission is reviewing a proposed $45 billion merger between Time Warner Cable and Comcast Corp, the two largest U.S. cable providers. (Reporting by Marina Lopes and Alina Selyukh in Washington and Mary Wisniewski in Chicago; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe)