Wednesday cable outage during hockey game caused by storms across Midwest

On Wednesday evening, storms throughout the Midwest stifled services provided by Charter Communications. And although the weather in Cape Girardeau was relatively mild, local Charter customers were affected by the technical difficulties.

This was particularly untimely for hockey fans who were home watching Game 7 between the St. Louis Blues and the Dallas Stars.

The Blues were ahead 5-0 at the end of the second period when the service dropped out.

Although their eventual win may have been a foregone conclusion, it did not stop customers from taking to social media to complain of outages, many of them posting directly to Charter to express their displeasure.

Charter customers throughout Missouri, California, Michigan and Wisconsin lost service, a representative for the company said. While not all channels were affected, many stations dropped out in the evening, including Fox Sports Midwest, which was showing the Cardinals’ game in Anaheim, California.

The representative confirmed the outage but couldn’t say what caused the issue.

“The headends went down,” she said, referring to the main facility where the cable distribution occurs. “We had techs working through the night to repair the situation.”

The technical difficulties affected customers’ cable, internet and phone service throughout Wednesday evening.

The games carried on without interruption in homes with satellite service, as well as in many local bars and restaurants.

Paul Blaylock, general manager at Hotshots Sports Bar and Grill, said most sports bars in the area carry satellite service rather than cable because of the sports packages offered, so their game-watching experience was unaffected by Charter’s technical issues.

Some bars even benefited from it.

Melanie Robinett, a bartender at Beef O’ Brady’s said they saw an influx of people after the cable dropped.

Cable service has been restored to the region. A second representative with the company said most people were reconnected within an hour, and service was restored fully by 2:30 a.m.

bbrown@semissourian.com

(573) 388-3630