About 3 percent of Lincoln Time Warner Cable customers had their digital video recorders wiped clean of memory and settings on Thursday because of a glitch in the system.

But the problem has been addressed, and all affected customers have been notified, said Time Warner spokesperson Ann Shrewsbury.

“Fortunately,” she said, “this happened after the Olympics and before (Saturday’s) Husker game.”

Here’s what happened:

Time Warner services are transmitted to homes via a network of fiber optic cables, with different areas of town served by hubs of fiber optics. Sometimes, if a hub has too many customers seeking service at once, a “bottleneck” can occur, slowing down service. Time Warner can move a group of customers from one hub to another to level out the service across town.   

On Thursday, after Time Warner moved some of its south Lincoln customers from one hub to another, the DVR boxes of those customers rebooted, erasing everything on them.

“For instance,” Shrewsbury said, “if a customer had their DVR set to record a particular program every week, that info was erased.”  

Beth Scarborough, division president of Time Warner Cable, lives in south Lincoln and was one of the customers affected. 

To the uninitiated, DVRs, much like TiVO, allow viewers to record TV shows, movies and programs. A person can program his viewing schedule hours, days or weeks in advance. Time Warner offers DVRs with some of its cable plans.

When Time Warner became aware of the problem, the company notified all affected customers by setting their boxes to Channel 1, which ran a message that explained the situation. Those who had phone numbers listed on their accounts received voicemails.

Shrewsbury said if affected customers call, Time Warner will apply credit to their accounts.

“We realize that DVR has become such a part of some people’s everyday lives,” she said, “that they rely on it for how they watch TV.”