Comcast customers across the United States were slowly coming back online late Friday afternoon after a massive outage left them without internet, cable TV, and telephone service.
The outage started Friday morning and quickly spread to several cities, including New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta, San Francisco, Denver and Chicago, according to Downdetector.com, a site that monitors service outages. Complaints peaked early in the day, but Comcast (CCZ) service problems continued popping up well into the afternoon. In some cases the outage last most of the afternoon, but Comcast said in a tweet Friday evening that it had started restoring service.
The company was trying to determine just what went wrong, but said in a statement that "one of Comcast's large backbone network partners had a fiber cut that we believe is also impacting other providers."
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The company could not say how many people were affected by outage, which it called "nationwide."
Fiber optic cables are used for long distance high-speed data transmission.
One of Comcast's large backbone network partners had a fiber cut that we believe is also impacting other providers. It is currently affecting our business and residential internet, video and voice customers. We apologize & are working to get services restored as soon as possible — ComcastCares (@comcastcares) June 29, 2018
Customers took to their cellphones and mobile devices to complain vociferously on Twitter. Some reported difficulty getting through to Comcast customer service. The company took to Twitter to provide updates and urged customers not to call 911.
Comcast said Friday that the hours-long interruption of its internet, video and voice services, was caused two separate and unrelated fiber cuts to the company's large network providers. The company is working to restore services.
“We identified two, separate and unrelated fiber cuts to our network backbone providers. Our engineers worked to address the issue immediately and services are now being restored to business and residential internet, video and voice customers. We again apologize to anyone who was impacted.”
The company did not specify which providers were impacted.
A source told CNBC that one of the cuts occurred in CenturyLink's network.
CenturyLink said its network is operating normally, but said there were fiber cuts in its network Friday.
“While the CenturyLink network continues to operate normally, on June 29, we experienced two isolated fiber cuts in North Carolina affecting some customers that by themselves did not cause the issues experienced by other providers. At this time, our technicians are working to restore the services,” the company said in a statement.
Comcast reported last quarter it serves 29.6 million total business and residential customers. It is the second largest U.S. pay TV provider, behind AT&T, since its DirecTV acquisition,.
Disclosure: Comcast is the owner of NBCUniversal, parent company of CNBC and CNBC.com.
Comcast is currently experiencing a nationwide outage in the US, which explains why users on social media have been complaining that they were unable to connect to platforms like Sony’s PlayStation, Netflix, and Microsoft’s Xbox Live. Essentially, the outage may be causing problems for anyone using Xfinity as an ISP, regardless of what products, apps, or services they’re trying to access.
According to Down Detector, there have been over 11,000 reports of Comcast outages since 12:30PM ET. Comcast confirmed the outage on Twitter, with a spokesperson saying that the company is “working to restore service.” Microsoft has updated its status page to indicate that Xbox Live members may be experiencing connection problems.
Comcast confirmed on Twitter that the outage was caused by one of its “large backbone network partners” having cut a fiber cable, which could also be affecting other ISPs.
Photo: Joe Raedle (Getty)
If you’re a Comcast customer, you might have already realized your internet is borked today. That wave of sadness and despair you’re presumably experiencing seems to be the result of a few cut fiber cables, according to a tweet from Comcast. If it makes you feel any better, the company says it’s trying to fix it.
Earlier today, various internet services seemingly went down, reflected in a spike of outage reports on sites like Down Detector. A tweet from Newsday reporter Joan Gralla stated the source of the disruption was actually a series of fiber line cuts, one cut between New York and Chicago, the other between Ashburn and South Carolina.
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The issue also seems to have shut down Comcast’s Xfinity Service Status page.
Comcast confirmed the severed fiber in a tweet, stating that one of its “large backbone network partners had a fiber cut that we believe is also impacting other providers. It is currently affecting our business and residential internet, video and voice customers. We apologize & are working to get services restored as soon as possible.”
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Gizmodo has reached out to Comcast to learn more about how, exactly, one goes about crippling Internet connectivity throughout the country, and will update this story accordingly. Until then, enjoy the sunshine before we fuck that up, too.
