More than 210,000 Mediacom customers in the central, western and southeastern portions of Iowa and northern Missouri experienced an outage of internet services Tuesday afternoon. Mediacom Communications Director Phyllis Peters told the Business Record that the outage began at 2:51 p.m. and lasted until 3:30 p.m. She said phone services were also interrupted for some customers but fewer than those affected by the internet outage. The interruption in services was caused by the failure of an electronics component in an aggregation router, a hub for routing network traffic. Peters said this is not an issue that has happened before and so far Tuesday’s heat does not appear to have been a factor. The manufacturer of the electronic component and Mediacom network engineers are continuing to investigate to determine what caused the part to fail. Around 6 p.m. Tuesday evening, Peters said the same electronic component had issues, which caused an intermittent pause on the network routing affecting internet access for a subset of the customers affected by the first outage.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated with new information about the interruption on Tuesday evening.