Time Warner Cable Inc. share price down, Internet service outage increases scrutiny over merger deal

The outage of Time Warner Cable Inc.s Internet service on August 27th will raise the scrutiny of its planned merger with Comcast Corp. Governor Andrew Cuomo said in a statement today that the New York State Department of Public Service is to investigate the service disruption as part of the review of the proposed merger.

Mr. Cuomo said in an e-mailed statement, which was cited by Bloomberg: “Today’s widespread Internet outage that has apparently impacted more than 11 million customers at Time Warner – which is based in New York – is a stark reminder that our economy is increasingly dependent on a reliable broadband network.”

Time Warner Cable said that its service was restored back to normal. About 11 million subscribers were affected by the problem Wednesday morning after the companys Internet service was knocked down for more than 60 minutes by routine network maintenance.

The problem comes only a few days after Time Warner Cable was fined by federal regulatory authorities for inadequate reporting of outages last year.

According to the companys statement, the Internet service outage started around 4:30 a.m. EDT during a standard overnight network maintenance.

As reported by the Wall Street Journal, a spokesman of Time Warner Cable Inc. said that “an erroneous configuration was propagated throughout our national backbone, resulting in a network outage” while an IP addresses allocation was being managed. “A failure of this size is very serious and we are taking the necessary steps to improve our processes with the objective of making sure this doesnt happen again,” the company added.

Time Warner Cable Inc. fell by 0.16% on Wednesday in New York to close at $147.11 per share, marking a one-year change of +36.18%. The company is valued at $41.12 billion. According to CNN Money, the 15 analysts offering 12-month price forecasts for Time Warner Cable Inc. have a median target of $173.00, with a high estimate of $198.00 and a low estimate of $125.00. The median estimate represents a +17.60% increase from the last price of 147.11.