Recently, Internet service went down for millions of Americans as Time Warner provider suffered a major outage. The broadband provider has about 12 million subscribers across the country and said that it was investigating the reason for the outage. 1.5 hours after the incident, the company said “services were largely restored”, but it turned out that an hour later it was still “working to restore services to all areas”.

Millions of people who found themselves cut off the Internet besieged the helplines and social media accounts of Time Warner Cable, the company that declared an operating income of $1.1bn in the 2nd quarter. Just before the incident, the company paid $1.1m to resolve an investigation from the FCC which found the cable provider failed to properly report multiple network outages.

The report of the agency claimed that Time Warner Cable did not file a substantial number of reports about reportable wireline and Voice Over Internet Protocol network outages. The ISP admitted that its failure to timely file the required network outage reports did violate the rules set by the agency.

At the moment, the FCC is reviewing a deal for company to be acquired by Comcast, a cable and internet giant. This offer comes after Time Warner received a $60bn offer from smaller rival Charter Communications, but chose to accept Comcast’s offer of $45.2bn after Charter Communications threatened to unseat the company’s board of directors.

In the meantime, consumer groups have repeatedly warned that merging the two companies would not be very good for consumers, as this would further reduce competition in an already monopolized market of Internet services. A number of studies confirmed that services competing against Comcast, including Netflix, have been throttled by the provider, with the delivery speed of media being significantly slowed by the Internet service provider.

Industry experts point out that Time Warner and other cable companies are now facing growing competition from such tech giants as Google. The search giant installed fiber optic cables in some US cities and claims that its broadband speeds are up to 100 times faster than typical broadband.