Time-Warner cable says that 1.2 million Internet users in Southern California were knocked offline for about 2 1/2 hours late last night by a failure in one of their computer servers. A Time-Warner spokesman told NBC News that the failure occurred in a domain name server, a device that translates Internet names such as "google.com" into Internet Protocol addresses (a series of numbers and dots).

The problem lasted into this morning for some Time-Warner customers who tried to reboot their cable modems during the outage. Apparently a glitch in the system wouldn't permit those modems to reconnect. The company says that it "patched" the problem Tuesday morning and that most customers should be back online.