Are Any of You Experiencing a Poky Internet?

By: Mr. Wilson on February 27, 2009
Thanks to Karin for alerting me to a problem some Time Warner Cable internet subscribers may be experiencing. Apparently TWC has been getting slammed by a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack on their DNS servers, resulting in slow performance across the network. Phrased another way, a bunch of dorks are hogging TWC's internet address books so that your computer has to wait in line for ages while trying to look up the info needed to find google.com. Since it appears to be a DNS attack, you may find relief by switching to OpenDNS. It may sound like voodoo to you, but there is a handy step-by-step guide you can follow. I'm curious how many of you have experienced the slowdown. Have you tried switching to OpenDNS, and if so, did that help?

Comments

See what your friends and neighbors have to say about this.

Fletch
February 27, 2009 at 6:23PM

It couldn’t happen to a nicer company than the clowns at TWC. Maybe they can get a sense of the frustrations they heap onto their customers on a daily basis.

Sorry for the end users, of course.

Ophelia_Payne
February 27, 2009 at 6:41PM

We started having issues last week, usually around 10 p.m where we were unable to access websites, connect to Netflix, log into xBox Live.  Every night I have called in (5 times now) and told a different story.  Last night I was told that they had finally determined what the issue was and were fixing it.  I work from home, and during the hours when my children are asleep, so not being able to access 90% of the sites has been rather detrimental.  Add to it that every time I get pushed to “level 3” of Time Warner, I’m dealing with an outsourced employee in India who keeps getting the definition of “sir” mixed up and calling me “Sir” after each sentence.

Ophelia_Payne
February 27, 2009 at 6:42PM

Side note.. I’m not a sir.. I’m a Ma’am, and he knew it since he started the conversation with “Hello Mrs. Ophelia Payne”.

Karin Dalziel
February 27, 2009 at 7:09PM

I plan to switch to Open DNS tonight. Hopefully that fixes it. My co-worker thinks the DNS reason is a farce on Time Warner’s part, a way to push the problem onto the users, but I don’t know enough about it to say.

At least I know now that it’s not my computer that’s the problem. 😊

Karin Dalziel
February 27, 2009 at 7:14PM

Oop, I meant to say above that my co-worker thinks the DOS attacks are a farce, not the DNS. Anyway, one of our computers got turned into a zombie once, so it seems plausible to me.

Ophelia_Payne
February 27, 2009 at 7:35PM

I read the article and the statement that they stepped up security measures on the 24th apparently didn’t fix the issues, as the issue happened on the 25th and 26th.

Moses
February 27, 2009 at 8:38PM

My Time Warner at home was very slow last night but I ran the speedtest this morning and it was fine on my desktop.  However, my laptop is now downloading at about half the speed of my desktop.  A few weeks ago they were equal. Any ideas?  As far as I know we haven’t changed anything.

beerorkid
February 27, 2009 at 8:47PM

I have been rocking opendns for about 2 months now.  back when I could not get on LJS and a day later the LJS addressed it on their site.

Only difference I have found is when you get a URL wrong it goes to their search instead of googles.

Mr. T
February 28, 2009 at 1:16AM

Glad to hear (in a way) that you were suffering along with me. Its struck me for the past few nights at around 9:30-10 PM as well. I use Chrome as my main browser and these problems first started I kept on getting a “resolving host” prompt for a few seconds before the page didn’t load. I then moved to Firefox and saw that it too was having issues. Thus, I figured it was a TWC issue.

CP
February 28, 2009 at 3:23AM

I have been suffering in silence all week - assumed it was me somehow.

I jumped to OpenDNS tonight, which seems to have resolved the slowness, though it is a pretty short test so far.

The other nice thing about OpenDNS is that it is a router based filter as well. Now that my kids are old enough to be on the internet, it’s nice to have a basic porn filter. I don’t want to explain THAT for a few more years.

Caleb
March 2, 2009 at 3:04PM

I’ve been using OpenDNS and didn’t notice any problems with my cable service lately.

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