It’s Not Just You: Comcast Is Having A Nationwide Outage Today

This morning, some readers alerted us that they were having problems with their cable TV. Were they alone? Were they being punished by the entertainment gods on a federal holiday? No, as far as we know, that isn’t actually a thing. What we do know is that there are outages reported in cities across the country, and Comcast’s Twitter team is posting so rapidly that their wrists may be on fire. UPDATE: The outage is over.

heatmap

The ever-helpful Downdetector.com shows us on their “heat map” that outage reports are concentrated on population centers, which makes sense, and that people are reporting problems with their Comcast connections in cities across the country.

A general message from the @ComcastCares Twitter account apologizing for outages was briefly up, then disappeared, and now the company is replying to individual customers instead.

(Thanks to Stephanie for nabbing this screen cap for us.)

(Thanks to Stephanie for nabbing this screen cap for us.)

Will customers be due a refund? After two outages in three days on the X1 platform back in 2014, Comcast did offer customers a small refund for their trouble.

Meanwhile, you won’t find any mention of the outage on the main @comcast Twitter feed, but you will find what was certainly a pre-scheduled message about providing Internet access to disadvantaged children. Customers are feeling rather disadvantaged themselves, and weren’t pleased with the message.

https://twitter.com/calirunner60/status/699277375050153984

Ironically, the cable company’s “help and support” pages are also down as of this post.

help_and_support

Update: Reader Joseph reports that phone support is down, which makes sense if everyone is calling in at once. “1-800-Xfinity says all circuits are busy,” he writes. “CAN’T EVEN SPEAK TO TECH SUPPORT….”

Second Update: We wrote to Comcast to ask what’s up, and they sent us this statement in response:

We have repaired the temporary network interruption that impacted some of our services this morning. Our engineers continue to work on this issue and almost all services have already been restored. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused our customers.

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