Time Warner Cable had a major service outage on Wednesday morning, but the response was slow and questionable. As people throughout the country took to Twitter to report loss of Internet service, the company was quiet, and calls went unanswered.

Customers joked about how to solve the problem:

After about an hour of reported complaints, TWC tweeted about the outage:

Another hour later, TWC issued this statement:

"At 4:30 a.m. ET today, during routine network maintenance, an issue with our Internet backbone created disruption with our Internet and On Demand serices. At of 6 a.m. ET services were largely restored, as updates continue to bring all affected customers back online."

Although TWC claims the outage was caused by an Internet backbone problem, some suspect the company's system was hacked. Reports say that the outage seems more like a DDoS attack (distributed denial of service).

Discussion Starters:

• Assess TWC's response. Is it fair to say that the response was slow? Someone did tweet at 7 a.m., and maybe employees were busy working on fixing the problem?
• Analyze TWC's statement. If the outage was caused by a DDoS attack, why won't the company admit it, as so many others have?