Raleigh, N.C. — As many as 250,000 Time Warner Cable customers in the Triangle area lost their service for almost four hours Thursday after a dump truck knocked out a major cable, officials said.

Time Warner spokesman Tom Lawrence said a fiber-optic cable on Glenwood Avenue was cut at about 10:45 a.m. and restored at 2:15 p.m.

A dump truck drove under the cable that crossed Glenwood near Brownleigh Road, and the tarp-rolling mechanism designed to keep debris from flying out snagged a cable with 144 fiber-optic lines, Lawrence said. The cable wasn't severed but was pulled loose from a connector box, he said.

Television, digital phone and Road Runner Internet service were affected in Raleigh, Cary, Wilson, Goldsboro, Farmville and part of Pitt County, Lawrence said. Service in Durham, Chapel Hill and Moore County wasn't affected by the outage, he said.

About 70 percent of Time Warner’s Road Runner customers and about 60 percent of its digital phone customers were affected, he said. They either lost service entirely or experienced slow Internet connections or "degraded quality" on their phone calls, he said.

Cable television service was affected on some channels in some areas, Lawrence said.