Shock, panic and drama hit the United States this morning, when people all over the country realized they were faced with the equivalent of a zombie Apocalypse: a nationwide Internet service outage. As some early commentators observed, Time Warner Cable got sick and tired with living in Comcast’s shade and not having its own share of bad publicity, it pulled, unwillingly, of course, a stunt that actually paralyzed half the country. Joke aside, the problem was severe in terms of the outage spread. News outlets revealed that

Both the East and West Coast seemed to be hit worse than regions toward the center of the country. New York, New Jersey, and areas of California near Los Angeles had experienced hours of downtime, with Time Warner promising on social media to resolve the issue as soon as possible.

The problem occurred very early in the morning today, during routine maintenance works done to the network. The Time Warner Cable officials made fast announcements and statements, together with solid promises for fixing things up:

At 430am ET this morning during our routine network maintenance, an issue with our Internet backbone created disruption with our Internet and On Demand services. As of 6am ET services were largely restored as updates continue to bring all customers back online.

Business Insider (whom we thank for the photo above) was the first on the scene, bringing the good news and making some astute observations related to the real onset hour of the outage. While the Time Warner Cable Internet service outage took quite little time, frustrated customers took their comments and complaints on Twitter, presumably with the help of their smartphones. Reactions came from everywhere and there is no magazine, blog, online journal or media outlet to not notice that this issue occurred two days after

Time Warner Cable agreed to pay a $1.1 million penalty to the Federal Communications Commission for failing to file “a substantial number” of proper reports on outages that it had notified the agency about.

Given the fact that the Time Warner Cable Internet service outage of today negatively impacted the entirety of Time Warner Cable’s network, we are talking about 29 states and 11.4 million high-speed Internet customers. That substantial number of proper reports on outages is not going to be a problem anymore in the future.

On the other hand, many people were actually sleeping and didn’t even notice the outage, while the early birds didn’t even curse their lives because of the incident. As long as you can have some access to social media in order to complain about broken Internet services, isn’t life wonderful?