Thousands of Internet users found themselves cut off for about an hour when TM’s Streamyx service was interrupted by what looks to be a nationwide service failure.

Irate Malaysians have taken to Twitter as well as popular tech forum Lowyat.net to declare unanimously: “Streamyx sucks!”

Gareth Davies, IT security consultant and popular blogger, made the effort to ‘ping’ the main TM server and his findings showed service failures across the board. Connections to Penang, Johor, and most of the Klang Valley were down, according to his findings.

“I’d like to know what happened, ” Davies (right) said. “It seems like the whole network just dropped.”

Davies, himself a long-time Streamyx user says this is the first such experience he’s seen.

“I’ve seen area blackouts but never anything on this scale.”

Twitter fury

Malaysians with access to alternate Internet connections, such as mobile 3G were quick to voice their displeasure at TM.

On Twitter, Streamyx customers labeled their tweets with the Twitter tag #streamyxsucks.

Besides voicing their frustration, users shared tips and experiences. One user reported being able to connect to the Internet by switching to Google’s DNS servers instead of TM’s.

On popular tech forum lowyat.net, users from all over Malaysia from Sabah and Sarawak to Johor and Penang reported their service issues in a thread. Some anecdotes proved fairly entertaining such as this one from the user jamince:

“Streamyx in my office – Kelana Jaya is down too. My admin called Streamyx to ask if our account had been suspended. They checked for a long time, then they answered: “Sorry, I’m not able to check because our office Internet is down too.”

Efforts to contact TM for clarification have proven futile as its support line was unreachable.

One Malaysian Twitter user, bongkerz claimed to have gotten through to TM’s customer service, who confirmed the outage but gave no reason to its cause.