I Want My MSNBC

Time Warner Cable Channels Freeze

News 8, MSNBC, and ESPN 2 and possibly others disappeared for at least a day from Time Warner Cable. Where did they go and why?

If you tuned in to MSNBC yesterday (Monday, 7-26-10) to channel 49 on the Time Warner Cable Standard tier, you found a frozen picture some awful wreck or explosion. ESPN 2 was frozen on a NASCAR whizzing by the camera. News 8 was also static.

By this today, (Tuesday, 7-27-10), the frozen images had turned to “color bars”, an industry term for tuning cameras and equipment and a clear indication that TWC knew that there was something wrong.

Only the TWC “Standard” package channels were affected. Digital and HD channels were fine.

The channels returned to the Standard tier of channels shortly before 4 p.m. Tuesday for those who keep News 8 on all day long and other fans of Rachel Maddow or alt sports on MSNBC.

I was toward the end of an online “chat” with a TWC representative, when the channels were restored.

No, it didn’t just happen to you or your neighbors. This outage was across all of the Austin area, according to Stacy Schmidt, TWC communications. I thought it have impacted a lot of people because of the half-hour wait for customer service Monday evening.

Where did these channels go?

“It was a part of a technology upgrade in the standard tiers [gone bad],” Schmidt said. Engineers were still testing all portions of the market “area by area” to ensure that the channels were up Tuesday evening.

Schmidt promised more information. So, there will be more information, and there will be another customer service aspect of this story later.

© Jim McNabb, 2010