A major service outage at Time Warner (News - Alert) Cable knocked millions of customer offline on Wednesday morning, but the company says service are now being returned to normal with most people back online.

Regular routine maintenance scheduled for 4.30am ET this morning went awry where “an issue with our Internet backbone created disruption with our Internet and On Demand services,” said Time Warner Cable vice president for public relations Bobby Amirshahi to USA Today.

By around 6am, most services were back up and running but some customers across the country were still experiencing issues. TWC has 11.4 million customers in 29 states.

The outage is bad timing for Time Warner Cable as just last Monday it agreed to a $1.1 million fine from the FCC (News - Alert) for failing to provide sufficient reports on outages.

Business Insider first spotted the downtime in the early hours of this morning after checking the stats on Down Detector.

Luckily for Time Warner Cable, the blackout occurred in the early AM hours and only truly affected a portion of the large number of customers that could have been affected had the blackout happened in the afternoon.

Customers that still had access, or limited access, took to Twitter (News - Alert) to voice their annoyance at the sudden drop in service. Customers in the Northeast were hit worst with patches elsewhere in California and Texas.

Currently Time Warner has been fighting a wave of criticism from officials and customers alike as it tries to close its merger deal with Comcast (News - Alert), which is valued at $45.2 billion. The merger would make the new company far and away the largest Internet service provider in the United States, which has raised a number of concerns regarding fairness and competition. Most recently, Netflix took a stand against the merger.