Stephen Rex Brown There it is: free wi-fI!

Many East Village residents have expressed their dismay over the Time Warner cable outage that occurred this morning. Well, The Local is here to give you good news (if you can manage to get it without internet service): free wi-fi is now available in Tompkins Square Park.

A spokesman with the Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications said that the service quietly launched on Sept. 29, and a stroll through the park confirmed that sure enough, “attwifi” is an available network there.

Meanwhile, a spokesman for Time Warner Cable said that the outage was the result of a fire in the Lower East Side, which melted a portion of the fiber-optic network.

“Over 100 nodes connected to this portion of our fiber network lost connectivity and thus we had customer outages,” the spokesman said. “We are reconnecting each strand of fiber back to the existing network. Therefore, node by node, we’re bringing service back online.”

Service is expected to be restored this evening.

Update | 5 p.m. The Time Warner Cable spokesman writes that most service has been restored, and that all cable television customers will automatically get a credit for today’s lost service.