UPDATE: If You Have Time Warner Internet, You Might Not Be Able to Read This

A widespread service crash left thousands of Time Warner Cable Internet and phone subscribers without service for more than six hours Sunday.

The outage, which affected customers in Los Angeles, Orange County, the Coachella Valley and San Diego, began as slow service overnight and deteriorated to a complete, intermittent breakdown by 6:40 a.m., according to City News Service.

Time Warner Cable engineers later found a malfunctioning piece of equipment at an undisclosed location "outside the state of California'' and began reprogramming routers around 1 p.m. to avoid the bottleneck, said company spokesman Jim Gordon.

Repairs began to take effect in some locations immediately, and the entire system was supposed to be functioning normally by midafternoon, he said.

The data interruption also cut telephone service for some customers who use Time Warner for dial-tone phone service.

During the outage, customers were advised not to follow the usual procedure of unplugging their modems to reboot.

"We know that's unusual, because normally we tell people the first step they should take in an outage is `unplug and reboot,' " Gordon said. "But, in this case, unplugging a modem may result in total loss of service,'' he said.

Customer-service reps in California told customers the entire Time Warner Internet network was down.

Cable television service did not appear to be affected.