Glitch zaps digital
cable subscribersAbout 600 customers in Kaimuki
go without service for hours
About 600 Oceanic-Time Warner digital cable customers were without service Friday night and yesterday morning due to a computer glitch, said Norman Santos, the company's vice president of operations.
Beginning about 4 p.m. Friday, customers in the Kaimuki area began calling the company, saying their digital cable boxes were repeatedly re-booting themselves, making watching shows impossible, Santos said.
"It was the strangest thing," he said. It affected only a fraction of the 20,000 customers on the Kaimuki service hub.
The company arranged to have affected customers exchange what were assumed to be defective cable boxes for new ones at three locations yesterday morning, including a company truck stationed at a park in Kaimuki, Santos said.
But as 25 technicians began switching out boxes in homes yesterday it soon became apparent that even with a new box in place, the problem continued, Santos said. Technicians working on the problem finally figured out that a main computer in Mililani needed reconfiguration.
Once that happened, Santos said, "all boxes in place came back to life."
About 120,000 of Oceanic-Time Warner's 375,000 customers statewide have digital service, Santos said.