If you’re a Time Warner Cable customer, welcome back! The Internet missed you. Many customers nationwide reported an outage this morning, though Time Warner claims that all customers are now back online.

Thanks to this outage, we learned about the very cool site DownDetector, which has heat maps for reported outages. They show concentrated Time Warner Cable outages reported in the Midwest, Texas, North Carolina, New York’s population centers, and New England. That’s to say, pretty much anywhere that there’s Time Warner service.

In theory, this should have nothing whatsoever to do with the company’s proposed merger with Comcast. However, any service hiccup is enough to make customers wonder whether their Internet and cable service provider really ought to merge with another, even bigger company. Combined, they could knock out Internet service to even more of the country.

The company blames backbone issues for the outage: to grossly oversimplify, it means that Time Warner Cable had problems with their connection to the Internet.

At least @TWC_Help was available all morning on Twitter to help frustrated customers.

Time Warner Cable customers lose Internet service nationwide [Los Angeles Times]

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