How the tracker works

1. User-submitted reports

Any Spectrum customer can submit an outage report from our report page. Each submission captures the city, state, ZIP code, and affected service (internet, TV, phone, mobile, or email). We hash the submitter's IP to rate-limit and de-duplicate — we never store raw IP addresses, and we never require an account.

2. Network probes

Independently of user reports, we run lightweight DNS and HTTP checks against public Spectrum-owned endpoints from geographically distributed vantage points. When multiple probes fail simultaneously in the same region, that's a strong signal of a genuine outage even before user reports catch up.

3. Aggregation and status classification

Reports are grouped by geography (city, then state, then national) and smoothed with a 30-minute rolling window. Status thresholds are simple and public:

• All systems normal — zero reports in the last 30 minutes
• Some users experiencing issues — 1 to 4 reports
• Elevated report volume — 5 to 14 reports
• Major outage in progress — 15 or more reports

4. What we don't do

We don't have access to Charter Spectrum's internal telemetry. We don't track your browsing. We don't sell your data. And we don't pretend to be Spectrum's official status page — this is a community tracker, and we're proud of that.

5. Editorial review

Every report submitted through the form is queued for human moderator review before it appears on the live map. This filters spam and prevents coordinated abuse.