What Do You Mean, There's No Internet?!

Cable and internet companies get a bad rap, be it from their contemptible customer service or frequent technical problems. Just ask the millions of Americans who suffered during Time Warner Cable's nationwide outage Wednesday morning, left in the dark and panicking. But thank God for smartphones, because the Internet-less were still able to tweet their collective cries of "What happened to the Internet?" and "We hate you, Time Warner Cable!" Nothing like a good, old-fashioned Web outage to bring people together, right?

The problems began early Wednesday morning in California and parts of the Northeast. At 4 a.m., the cable company made an official announcement via Twitter, writing that they were "working to restore services to all areas as quickly as possible." They didn't add when that might be.

Clearly, Time Warner Cable's 11.4 U.S. subscribers weren't going to just sit around and twiddle their thumbs — why twiddle when you can Twitter? After throngs of complaints and questions flooded the Twittersphere in regards to Time Warner Cable's outage, the company's PR team made several announcements.

"During our routine network maintenance, an issue with our Internet backbone created disruption with our Internet and On Demand services," Bobby Amirshahi, vice president of public relations, told ABC.

Later, the probably-exhausted Amirshahi told CNET:

As of 6am ET services were largely restored as updates continue to bring all customers back online.

But "largely restored" does not mean completely restored, and many poor souls continue to be without Internet.

Quickly, confusion turned into pure, unadulterated hatred, and Twitter users started hocking metaphorical rocks at the Internet service provider.

After venting and accepting their fate, the Internet-less started joking about the situation — perhaps Time Warner Cable's tagline should be that old saying: "Laugh at what you can't change."

Some people commented on how the outage underscores the importance of keeping cable and Internet companies from forming monopolies — like that proposed $45.2 billion Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger.

The deal is currently under scrutiny by the FCC. It's not just customers that oppose the deal — on Tuesday Netflix petitioned the FCC to deny the merger.

Despite the resistance, Comcast predicts that its acquisition of Time Warner Cable will be complete in 2015. Looks like cable and Internet companies will continue to be America's most common enemy.

Image: WSOCTV/Twitter