Bright House Networks: Service is Restored After Outage

Bright House Networks says it has completely restored all of its phone, high-speed Internet and cable service after a software bug caused an outage across the Tampa Bay region Tuesday.

The outage began around 10:40 a.m. Tuesday and caused an interruption in services across the area until about 5 p.m., the company said in a statement. The incident "had a cascading effect across areas of the market," Bright House spokesman Joe Durkin said. 

Durkin did not have an answer for customers wondering if their bills would be discounted because of the lost service.

"We haven't even thought about that yet," Durkin said. "Our priority was restoring services."

Bright House engineers worked with vendors to identify and correct the problem, the company said. "They were able to locate the cause as a software bug that triggered the event to begin and expand in scope," Durkin said.

Service was reported down in much of the area, including Hillsborough, Pinellas, Pasco and Manatee counties. On Twitter, there were hundreds of tweets Tuesday by customers reporting outages.

With more than a million Bright House customers across Tampa Bay, almost everyone was affected to some degree or another by the outage, Durkin said, but "not everyone lost everything."

The Pinellas County Sheriff's Office phone lines were down during the outage. Bright House's customer service and public relations phone lines were also down.

In Manatee County, several customers drove to the local Bright House Networks office to get updates because they could not reach anyone by phone.