Power Outages and How They Affect SMC Students

 On the evening of Feb. 22, Charter Spectrum customers in Southern California suffered an outage on their internet and TV services. The outage adds to an array of previous blackouts Spectrum already had. 

Spectrum store located at 328 Santa Monica Blvd, Santa Monica, Calif. On Monday, March 8, 2021. (Yasamin Jafari | The Corsair)

A little before 6:30 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 22, customers of Charter Spectrum experienced an internet and cable outage due to an unspecified problem that affected Santa Monica College (SMC) students in the Southern California area. Many were completing assignments or logged into Zoom meetings when the outage occurred. Spectrum tweeted that they were aware of the problem, and engineers were investigating and working towards a resolution at 6:23 p.m.

However, Spectrum has a history of problems in the past with Internet blackouts. According to Down Detector, a website that reports when cable and Wi-Fi are down, Spectrum's Internet outages date back to May 30 of last year. As Spectrum is the top internet provider in many areas in Los Angeles County, customers are stuck with poor connections and subpar service.

Spectrum completed the purchase of Time Warner Cable Inc. in an acquisition in 2016 for roughly 60 billion dollars. Spectrum is owned by Charter Communications Inc., which is "the second-biggest broadband provider and the third-largest" subscription television company. It also services more than 17 million video customers according to The Wall Street Journal. Unfortunately, money could not fix their biggest problem: their service.

"I wasn't able to work for two hours," said Mimi Gu, an SMC student who has been a Spectrum customer for 2 years. She, like others, relies on the internet nowadays to complete assignments for work and school. Gu and her boyfriend happened to be at home when the outage took place on Feb. 22. He works from home and she was in the midst of doing homework when the internet went out. Their apartment complex emailed them about the outage, so they didn't contact customer service — although they would have most likely not been able to get through to Spectrum support.

According to Twitter user @clampclontoller, who responded to Spectrum's initial tweet early Monday evening, they tweeted, "the customer service line isn't accepting incoming calls," and Spectrum instead requested that customers go online for further details.

"Our services were restored last night," said Dennis Johnson, Spectrum senior director of West Region communications, in a statement about the outage on Feb. 22. "We're looking into what caused a brief outage for some of our customers in L.A. and the surrounding areas. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused our customers who were affected." He also stated that "the service was restored in less than an hour."

This outage hasn't been the only hindrance for students completing their work online. In the summer of 2020, California experienced an outage of another type: power outages due to the influx of air conditioners used by residents because of a record-breaking heatwave. That led to a string of blackouts over California. According to Deadline, this was the largest power outage that California has ever seen with 3.3 million people affected. The California Independent System Operator turned off the power to prevent outages but failed in the end.

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