Cisco software bug sparked Bright House outage

The outage that left 1 million Bright House subscribers in Florida without cable TV, high-speed Internet and phone service on Tuesday was caused by a bug in software supplied by Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO), the MSO told FierceCable Friday.

"The outages were due to a Cisco software bug in the core routing system that Bright House Networks uses in its Tampa Bay system," Brighthouse VP of corporate communications Kimberly Makki said in an email.

Brighthouse said the software defect caused critical elements in its network to stop passing voice and data services, and that some customers also experienced video signal interruptions. "The interruptions generally were not lengthy for everyone. It was a cascading effect that we fortunately were able to contain within a couple of hours," Makki said.

The outage, which also left some government agencies and police stations in the Tampa Bay area without service, ran up to five hours, several local media outlets reported on Tuesday. Makki said the outages varied in length for customers, ranging from a few minutes to a few hours.

Bright House said that Cisco is working with the MSO to prevent similar outages.

"Cisco is still fully engaged with Bright House to investigate the incident to ensure that they have permanently corrected and prevented any reoccurrence of this issue," Makki said.  "We rely on and are proud of the strategic partnership we have developed with Cisco as our primary network data infrastructure provider. This partnership facilitates immediate technical engagement and management visibility from the Cisco team. We relied on those resources to provide technical expertise during the event, and we will continue to rely on this partnership to ensure that we are providing the best service experience possible."

Officials at Cisco didn't respond immediately to a request for comment Friday morning.

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