How this outage data is collected
Who maintains this site
spectrum-outage.com is maintained by the spectrum-outage.com monitoring team, an independent group that tracks consumer broadband reliability in the United States. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by Charter Communications or Spectrum, and we receive no data or funding from them.
Questions about the data, corrections, and press enquiries go to help@spectrum-outage.com. We aim to reply within two business days.
Where the data comes from
Every number on this site comes from one source: reports submitted by visitors who confirm a Spectrum problem in their own ZIP code. There is no scraping of Spectrum systems and no access to Charter network telemetry.
When someone submits a report, we record four things:
- the 5-digit ZIP code they entered
- which service is affected: internet, TV, phone, or all services
- an optional short description in their own words
- the UTC timestamp of submission
The ZIP code is mapped to the nearest of the 200 cities we cover, which is how a report reaches a city page. We store a one-way hash of the submitter's IP address for rate limiting, never the address itself.
How the 24-hour trace is built
Reports are grouped into hourly buckets across a rolling 24-hour window. The chart plots the total for each hour, so a rising line means more people reported problems during that hour, not that an outage was confirmed by Spectrum.
Each report is weighted to represent roughly 10 to 15 affected subscribers, on the basis that only a small fraction of affected customers ever report an outage anywhere. This weighting makes the scale of activity easier to compare between a small town and a large metro, and it is an estimate rather than a measured subscriber count.
Status labels follow report volume in the last hour. "Operational" means nothing unusual, "Degraded" means elevated reports, and "Major Outage" means a sharp concentration of reports for the area being viewed.
Rate limiting and abuse controls
A single IP address can submit at most five reports per hour. Submissions with an invalid ZIP code or an unrecognised service type are rejected before they reach the database. This keeps one motivated person from manufacturing an outage that does not exist, though it does not eliminate the possibility entirely.
Known limitations
We publish these openly because they affect how the data should be read:
- Reporting bias. Densely populated areas generate more reports than rural ones for an identically sized outage.
- Not a confirmation. A quiet chart does not prove your service is fine, and a busy chart is not an official Spectrum outage notice. Only Spectrum can confirm an outage on your account.
- Weighted estimates. Affected-subscriber figures are modelled from report counts, not measured.
- Coverage. We track 200 US cities. ZIP codes outside those areas return no data rather than a guess.
- Self-reported causes. A report describes a symptom the visitor experienced. Local equipment problems can look identical to a network outage.
Corrections
If you believe a report or a city page is wrong, email help@spectrum-outage.com with the city and approximate time. We remove reports that are clearly fabricated or submitted in error, and we will say so if we decline.
Using our data
Journalists, researchers, and other sites are welcome to cite this data. Please attribute it to spectrum-outage.com, link to the specific city page you drew from, and state that the figures are community-submitted reports. See the terms for details.