Comcast Dealing With Major Outage Nationwide, Fiber Line Cut
Comcast is now recovering from a nationwide outage that cut off video, broadband and even emergency services to parts of the U.S. last Friday, June 29. The cause was attributed to cut fiber lines that separated the provider from some of its crucial network partners.
The major outage affected Comcast subscribers across the country, and has also impacted the network's cable and telephone services. As charted by outage tracking website DownDetector.com, a spike in reports of Comcast-related issues came in around 8 a.m. ET on Friday morning, lasting well into the afternoon.
The areas most affected by the outage included the Pacific Northwest, California, the tri-state area, and Florida, as pointed out by The Verge. By 12:30 p.m. ET, more than 11,000 outage reports have been sent to DownDetector.com, with many more users flooding Twitter and social media with complaints as well.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
By late afternoon, Comcast has confirmed the cause of the nationwide outage, in a statement obtained by Slate. "We identified two, separate and unrelated fiber cuts to our network backbone providers," a representative from Comcast explained the issue.
"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 message from the network provider added.
Backbone provider CenturyLink has first responded that their lines did not have a problem but has since partly confirmed Comcast's statements as well, according to CNet. In its later statement, they noted that two isolated fiber cuts in North Carolina may have affected some customers.
AT&T and Verizon, meanwhile, stated that they were not aware of any similar incident on their networks. By 3:30 p.m. ET, Comcast has already pushed out an announcement that their service has been restored for most of their customers.
"We recognize that some customers are still impacted and we expect the issue to be fully resolved shortly. We have every resource focused on getting everyone back online and apologize again to the customers who were affected," Comcast added.
