Cox Pinpoints Broadband Blackout Cause

The outage that affected more than 2 million Cox broadband subscribers
Friday afternoon was caused by “an error in a configuration change made on
a regional router,” a spokesman for the cable operator said.

“Cox has thoroughly investigated this event and is undertaking exhaustive
measures to ensure that we do not experience a backbone outage due to these
same circumstances again in the future,” David Grabert, a Cox spokesman,
told internetnews.com.

Those measures include working with vendors on architectural fixes and
improvements to limit the impact of configuration change errors and the time
it takes to get back online, as well as making improvements in maintenance and
change management coordination, technical review and approval processes.

Atlanta-based Cox, which holds a nearly 3 percent share of the U.S. ISP
market, did not identify which network equipment vendors it will be working
with on the enhancements and safeguards.

The duration of the broadband
blackout was 82 minutes, Grabert said. Some areas were back in service
in as little as 30 minutes, however most of Cox Internet and Voice over
Protocol users were either “degraded or severely impacted
during this time,” he said.