Black Eye: Insight CEO Apologizes for HSD Outages

Insight CEO Michael Willner issued a public apology on TV after an upgrade to the MSO’s HSD service reportedly left thousands of its 417K or so broadband customers in its KY, IL and IN footprint without Internet service in recent weeks. "It’s been a tough week," Willner says in one commercial, which began airing Sun. "I am truly sorry. That is not the way we like to do business. We’ve been working round the clock to fix the problems, and we’re doing that. It pains me that some of you may have lost confidence in us. We’re working hard to gain it back." The outages-which have affected some subs for more than a week-were the result of Insight moving from AT&T’s Internet protocol backbone to its own platform. Four Insight subs have filed a class-action suit claiming breach of contract and violation of consumer protections. "We’re finding it fascinating that some of these lawyers ran to court immediately, before the situation had been resolved in an obvious effort to be the first in court-before they even knew what plans we have to deal with the situation," Insight spokeswoman Sandy Colony said. While local papers have reported as many as 2K customers experienced some form of an outage, Colony said she was unable to provide a number at this point because the MSO doesn’t want to divert people from fixing the problem. "It wasn’t a huge number," she said, adding that even a small percentage of impacted customers results in a high call volume. She could not provide an estimate as to how many are still having trouble with service. While some experienced outages for days, others were down for less than an hour. The first 2 phases of the backbone migration went smoothly, but this last phase of moving to a new network and new IP addresses caused some problems. "Because we did so much in a short period of time, there was a convergence of events," Colony said. The migration is complete in some markets. Insight suspended the move in other markets to work out the problems. It plans to start the migration again next week. Colony said the problems were "settling down" Mon. So it seemed. While some subs reported being on hold with Insight for as long as 2 hours last week, a call by Cfax to an Insight toll-free number created for the crisis was answered immediately Mon afternoon. Insight has not made a company-wide statement on credits for lost service yet. "We will deal with this, and we will make it right," Colony said.