An electrical issue at a major internet hub in Atlanta was to blame for lengthy internet service outages experienced by Mediacom customers in northeastern North Carolina earlier this week.
Nearly 17,000 customers in mainland counties served by Mediacom, including mainland Currituck, were without their Xtream internet service for much of the afternoon on Monday. Another outage began late Tuesday afternoon and continued well into the evening.
The outage only affected internet and phone service through Mediacom, while video services were not impacted.
Kim Mason, Director of Area Operations N.C. for Mediacom, explained Wednesday by email the problems the company experienced with its high-speed internet services that were also reported in Delaware and Maryland:
“(T)he World Wide Web is really many networks of networks…all interconnecting. And internet service providers have big data centers for banks of equipment and components, somewhat like the hubs commercial airlines use, and then signals (like planes) are distributed out to regions and then to subsets of the regions, etc.
What happened on Monday that affected Mediacom customers in North Carolina and Delaware was an issue that occurred in a major data or signal processing center in Atlanta, Georgia. In that facility (which Mediacom uses), an electrical issue occurred in one set of equipment components. The issue was identified at 9:46 a.m. It was corrected at 2:53 p.m.
During those hours, the issue blocked the transmission of high-speed data along a specific routing area that affected Mediacom internet customers in NC and DE. While our network engineers initially fixed the issue on Monday and service resumed, it re-occurred on Tuesday.
This second electrical issue was identified at 3:02 p.m. on Tuesday and was resolved at 6:13 p.m. With the re-occurrence, our engineering team delved deeper in their investigation of the cause; they identified that major cause during the outage timeframe on Tuesday. Permanent repairs were made and high-speed internet service has been stable since the repairs were made.
We regret the interruption this caused for Mediacom customers using our broadband services. This was a very rare type of electrical issue that could not be anticipated, and not the type of situation that our network monitoring tools would see in advance.
And because the issue occurred at an Atlanta site (data center), you and our customers can be assured that there was no issue within the local portions of our fiber-based network that delivers Gigabit-speed broadband service to businesses and residences in parts of our local area.”
