CINCINNATI -- No mistake about it, the Tri-State was rocked by crisis Monday night.
The way the suffering masses described it, it sounded like a cataclysmic natural disaster, or maybe a large-scale human conflict (tensions have been simmering for 200 years between Ohio and Kentucky, after all).
But nope, it was just another first-world problem: The Internet was out.
Time Warner Cable said the outage affected massive swaths of Ohio and Kentucky (along with Wisconsin, but we're not cheeseheads, so who cares).
Is your @TWC Internet down? You've got lots of company. (Map via https://t.co/xhCZzwcdfj) pic.twitter.com/Q0yK7Gykli
— WCPO (@WCPO) December 1, 2015
Somehow, quite miraculously, hundreds griped about their inability to get on the Internet... on the Internet: Some customers were irate they pay for glitchy service they couldn't use; others griped they couldn't get through to a real person on the phone.
By Tuesday morning, outages were still being reported via Facebook and Twitter. However, several stories on national media outlets reported that the outage had been repaired.
WCPO's calls to Time Warner's customer service line went unanswered. The telecom giant didn't have a specific cause of the outage, and its social media team (@TWC_Help) was left to tweet promises that they were "working to resolve a known issue" with "no time frame" for a fix.
Until then, customers are being forced to hobble along using an LTE connection (or - gasp! - the ancient 3G), all the while eating up the last of their precious, pricey data plans.
The best advice, of course, might be the now-clichéd but never-used British propaganda poster from World War II: Keep calm and carry on.
