QUEENS, NY – Borough President Melinda Katz stated the following in response to questions about the massive Spectrum service disruption that reportedly affected 60,000 customers’ access to internet, cable and phone in Queens:

“Spectrum neglected to properly inform tens of thousands of their customers about this massive outage until 12 hours after it began. The lack of timely information from Spectrum on the initial outage and residual outages post-restoration is unacceptable. Given the extreme inconvenience and disruptions caused by the prolonged outage and the dearth of information to 60,000 of its customers, a partial refund of a few dollars for the day is more insult to injury than a good faith effort to make customers whole. Besides the obvious question of how to make customers whole, two more important questions remain to which we still await answers: how will Spectrum prevent such an outage in the future, and how does Spectrum plan to better communicate about such outages with its customers?”

According to Spectrum, the outage first began at approximately 2:00 AM on Monday, June 26 due to fiber-optic cables damaged by vandalism; the outage affected 60,000 customers in Queens. Spectrum informed customers this morning on Twitter that “services have been restored”, 27 hours after the outage began.

Follow Borough President Katz via @melindakatz or www.facebook.com/queensbpkatz

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