CenturyLink, the nation’s third largest network, is experiencing a nationwide outage of broadband service. During this outage CenturyLink customers will not be able to access any internet related services, and may experience difficulty in contacting CenturyLink Technical and Customer Support, as their support systems are so overwhelmed even their own website has experienced intermittent downtime. CenturyLink, provides service to over 5.8 million broadband subscribers. There are currently no estimates on how long it will take to restore service.

A spokeswoman confirmed the outage, but had few details:

“We are currently experiencing a disruption with our Internet service. We are working with our vendors to restore service as soon as possible and apologize for any inconvenience this has caused our customers. We will continue to work towards resolution until all issues are resolved.”

Earlier this year in January, competing Telco provider AT&T experienced a substantial service outage affecting thousands of its customers, and lasting for an extended period of several days. The cause of that outage was determined to be a software update that affected a significant number of AT&T’s 7.4 million U-verse subscribers.

Update: Service has been restored to most CenturyLink customers as of 1 pm PDT (4 pm EDT).

Carmen Butler, market development manager for CenturyLink in Tallahassee Florida, said service was restored to most customers. As many as 1 million CenturyLink broadband customers were affected by the outage.

Butler said a problem with core routers, devices that transfer data, were the cause of the outage. She said a thorough review is under way.