Major internet outage problems plagued the east coast this weekend due to technical difficulties with a fiber optic hub owned by one of the major internet providers in the region.

According to a report published by the Wall Street Journal, Level 3 Communications Inc. struggled with a major outage of its internet service on Saturday that left many east coast users – especially those in the state of New York – without access to the web for the better part of 24 hours. The problem resulted from a technical problem on Level 3’s end, a failure of a high-traffic fiber-optic switch that cut off a substantial portion of the company’s internet service network.

Naturally, not all users on the east coast area were left without internet, but customers with a Cablevision Optimum service package or any sort of internet service executed through Time Warner Cable were left out of luck for most of the day on Saturday. Optimum was able re-rout traffic on their end to salvage most customer internet access early on in the outage. Time Warner, on the other hand – as well as many other companies affected by the outage – had to wait for Level 3 to fix the faulty network switch.

Despite the lengthy nature of the outage, Level 3 and its constituents can at least be thankful that the problem occurred on a weekend rather than during a chaotic business week. Since Level 3 supports networks for both ISPs – which were clearly impacted by the outage – and for major corporations throughout the New York area – which were mostly not – the outage could have been significantly more problematic on a Tuesday or Wednesday.

That’s not to say that businesses were not impacted by the problem, however. Just earlier this year, Level 3 snagged a major contract right from underneath AT&T by procuring the job of providing internet access to each of the Starbucks Corporations 7,000-plus stores throughout the United States.

The new contract, a partnership with Google that put Starbucks Wi-Fi service in the hands of Google and network connectivity in the hands of Level 3, made big waves in the headlines back in August. Just how much Saturday’s outage impacted Starbucks stores throughout New York City or in the New Jersey or Philadelphia areas remains unclear, though any major internet difficulty would have caused a fairly substantial blow toward the Starbucks brand.

The biggest part of the problem wasn’t the initial outage, however, but the amount of time it took Level 3 to fix the problem. While some providers, Cablevision Optimum, were able to circumvent the Level 3 breakdown, others seemingly made little attempt to re-rout traffic around the problem, causing some to speculate as to whether Level 3 warned all of its constituents that the problem was taking place.