Comcast Experiences Widespread Outage, Again, and Again, and Again 4/7/2005 - 8,631 views, 20 Comments
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Internet provider ComCast experienced a widespread outage today, knocking countless Comcast customers off the Internet for the duration. The notice on the Comcast website is short and to the point, acknowledging the outage by saying “Connection to the Internet is currently unavailable. Our technicians are aware of the situation and are working to resolve the issue. This outage was logged at : 4/7/2005 5:32:00 PM EDT.” It is followed by no fewer than three notices, all within minutes of each other, indicating that “scheduled maintenance” has been completed. Coincidence? Or not? Aunty actually thinks that the more interesting similarity is that it appears that Comcast has a widespread outage on an annual basis. In searching for information about this outage, Aunty discovered, in near perfect chronological order, an article in Email Universe detailing a general Comcast outage in February of 2002, a post on OTWeb complaining of a general outage in May of 2003, and News.com coverage of a Comcast email outage in March of 2004. It would seem by this measure that the only thing unusual about this year’s outage is that it appears to be about a month late. Interestingly, the News.com piece about last year’s email outage notes that it coincided with planned system work, which brings to mind the three notices of this year’s “scheduled maintenance”.
Perhaps rather than Comcast having a string of unbelievably coincidental bad luck, they just can’t perform system maintenance or updates without bringing down the house?
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I have been a Comcast customer for about 4 years, and an outage once a year is nothing to complain about, in my opinion.
I own my own computer support business, and I have the opportunity to experience many DSL customers frustrations first hand. The main DSL subscriber around here is SBC, and from what I’ve seen, I would never suggest that anyone choose their services over Comcast’s.
Comment by Dan — 4/9/2005 @ 3:55 pm
We have DSL/SBC at work and knock on wood it has been stable for a few months but before that we lost it about once a month, for usually less than six hours but we are very depebdebt so any internet shutdowns hurt. At home we have comcast and I must say it’s been faster and more reliable. Once a year shutdowns followed by emails that assure us increased download and upload speeds are OK by me.
Comment by Buddybaba — 4/9/2005 @ 7:54 pm
I have had Comcast Cable and it was reliable and fast. I have also had SBC DSL and it was OK, but Comcast is better. SBC uses PPPOE which is the worst form of DSL. I now have Speakeasy.net DSL (DHCP aka always on) and it is excellent. I have had minor outages with both Comcast & SBC. Speakeasy has never suffered an outage after 2 years, although I had minor speed issues which were quickly resoved.
Comment by Tim Larkin — 4/11/2005 @ 9:49 am
Call and get a refund for the time you were out. A few thousand customers requesting a refund ought to teach them how to do maintenance. Sounds like an IT dept that I worked near. Hmm some thing wrong? lets reboot everything and see if that fixes it.
Comment by Steven Ross — 4/13/2005 @ 10:37 am
Comcast is out AGAIN… I tried calling 1800-comcast and it was busy for the first 10 minutes I tried getting through. It seems to be a DNS issue, because I can access stuff by the ip. When it doesn’t work, it fails at the dns lookup. It either works or fails there…
Comment by jonyo — 4/13/2005 @ 5:40 pm
I finally got through to them last night and they told me that “weather” in south Florida was the fault. Last night was the third long outage in seven days in this area.
Comment by Bob Carlson — 4/14/2005 @ 5:06 am
I called them last night and they said it was due to someone having cut their cable line in Kent, WA, but that it would be back up any second. It still was not up this morning. I’ve tried Qwest DSL before, and their outages lasted for days at a time. It is disappointing to see this problem with Comcast now also. I wasn’t aware of typing in IP addresses, though as a workaround, I’ll try that tonight.
Comment by Mark — 4/14/2005 @ 12:34 pm
Comcast has been down again for hours now and as usual, there’s no information posted on their website. It’s not once a year, it’s once a month. On average. Some months it’s three or four days. But since they’re effectively a monopoly they have no real incentive to 1) improve service or 2) be accountable to their customers.
Comment by Mike Conrad — 6/15/2005 @ 11:46 pm
Comcast—when you finally reach them by phone they say well how do you know that nothing is posted on our website if your connection is down? I had to explain to them that it’s possible to use a dial-up ISP like AOL and still connect to the internet, even though Comcast clearly couldn’t care less if they’re connected or not. Essentially, when you call up Comcast to tell them they’re down AGAIN, they call you a liar. Hey it works for the government, right?
Comment by Billy O'Reilly — 6/16/2005 @ 11:36 am
My comcast internet has been going down recently at exactly 3:13am Pacific Time and is down for 1-2 hours each time. This has been going on for 2 weeks. A major outage just occured in the California area, they fixed it in an hour. My 3:13 outage still occurs the next night. I call comcast and they said they didnt know what my problem was and suggested a technician be sent out, I agree and schedule a tech and hang up. As soon as I hang up my internet comes back, this was just after 15 minutes of outage. Im usually down for 1-2 hours every time before. I call back and the next comcast tech rep could not explain, I cancelled the tech call and will see if my problem is mysteriously solved, I think it will be. Anyone else have this happen?
Comment by Kent — 8/5/2005 @ 4:23 am
My email went down today- there was a little message by the Inbox that said We are currently unable to retrieve your latest email messages. Please check back soon.
I called to find out what the story was- and of course got the usual story- there is an outage in the area. Of couse Franca coulldn’t tell me when it would be resolved- the skepticism im my voice may have caused her to add the following: It’s a nationwide outage! Funny, I could find nothing about it on any of the news stations. Does anyone know why therc is no government entity that regulates the internet?
Comment by Maureen Dougherty — 4/24/2006 @ 1:23 pm
My Comcast connection at Blue Springs, MO was up for a couple months. No problem. I am an IT savy person. Lately is works for 15 minutes, then dies for a minute, and starts working again. It is very frustrationg when you are remoting into work. I also have Vonage. So when it goes down it kills my phone service.
Comment by D — 1/23/2007 @ 7:47 pm
Comcast Internet Service is the worst. I have hours when it is offline on at least a 3 day a month basis. And when it does work it is spotty, having everyday a few hours where it is on and off one second to the next
Comment by Bill — 2/3/2007 @ 4:51 pm
In response to #10. I have had that happen numerous times when i have called Comcast during an outage, and within minutes of hanging up it miraculously comes back up. Coincidence? im beginning to think not
Comment by Bill — 2/3/2007 @ 4:53 pm
In response to #10 & #14: Check your “Automatic Update” settings - there may be a chance (since windows “Automatic Updates” defaults to 3:00AM) that your bandwidth is getting eaten by these downloads. Try “Tracert Yahoo.com” in a “Command Prompt” box, and see if you go anywhere during that time. After that, try a “Ping Yahoo.com”, and see if you get a response. If you can tracert, DNS is OK - if you can ping, your internet is OK. Try doing a Cable Modem speed test if both of those are OK.
Comment by Mike — 2/23/2007 @ 1:43 pm
We loose our comcast internet once or twice a month. The techs who come are actually embarrased as they can’t figure out why we keep loosing it. Right now my home internet is down (I’m at work), they say it will be 5 days before a tech can come to check it. Before it went down totally and running very slow I spoke to phone support. When he pinged my modem he said (this is a quote) “Oh you’re ONLY experiencing 30% packet loss”. I guess packet loss must be above 50% to be a problem.
Comment by Ger — 3/19/2007 @ 12:56 pm
I had problem with Comcast two years ago in Franklin, TN with the constant/continuous disconnection 10 minutes into the session. After hours or talking with few “only” assistants available at 1-800-COMCAST, I was finally assigned with a technitian two days later. He could not fix the connection freeze-up but yet recommanded that I just use the internet as it was, browsing the web sites for 5-10 minutes. Pause for a minute or two and continue on… I WAS SO OUTRAGED THAT I ALMOST THOUGHT OF GETTING MY RIFLE OUT AND SHOOTING HIM! Of course I quit COMCAST for good 16 months and moved on to local DSL. After hearing few good things about Comcast I changed my ISP to Comcast again few months ago. Just yesterday I am experiencing the same connection problem as two years ago. I have called 1-800-COMCAST in extreme frustration about 30 times until the assistant who obviously got tired of me made an appointment for tomarrow. I highly doubt that this technitian can do what another tech couldn’t do. I have different PC since two years ago with different modem, borrowed a friend’s PC with his modem and tried four different combinations of networking at my address; to no avail. I am wondering if Comcast is doing this on perpose to save up some packet on their servers. It maybe no big deal to people who use internet for sole web-browsing purpose. However, some people use internet to chat, download files bigger than 200MB, and play games online. Timed out lag spikes disconnect my cable connection every 5-12 minutes on all of above cases. I have went to many forums to find out if there are people out there who had same/similar problem with their connections, and -WOW- I found out in each and every State in US that Comcast offers their service, there are at least a person in every major city that has the very same connection problem I am going through. Some people have copy/pasted the connection activity log and posted on forums and I found out our problems all matched with drop outs called “Time out [Count #]”. I was assured of their stupidity when the operator on 1-800-COMCAST did not understand the issue. I even asked if she knew what Packet-Loss is and she told me that she would not have any knowledge out of Comcast Internet Service area. Thinking about all the lack of service + colliding with customer + absolutely helpless operators = No More Comcast for Me. I will make sure I influence and and all of the humanity out there to quit COMCAST if it is what they are using. I have just now gotten a warning from my family physician that my blood pressure has risen above maximum normal unit and asked me what caused me such a rise in Blood pressure…
In my Humble Opinion, Comcast is no better than AOL. And soon people will realize their folly for trusting or even liking their service. I am going to take a vacation after that tech guy comes to my house. Either he/she fixes the connection freeze or not I’ve had with Comcast, and now await for another company who is more friendly to customers with dissatisfaction. COMCAST has a lot to learn about business. ’nuff said.
Comment by Andy — 5/12/2007 @ 7:55 am
To Comcast– Fix your issues! Just look at the above post! Please…before Andy in TN goes on a three state killing spree!
To Andy– OMG bro, put the rifle down Lee Harvey…
Comment by Kris — 12/1/2007 @ 6:59 am
Back in 2006, Comcast would be down for days at a time. This lasted for a period of about nine months. Unfortunately, there were NO other options (except dial-up). Anyone that believes Comcast is a good service is sadly mistaken.
Comment by Nathan — 5/19/2008 @ 5:56 am
Comcast seem to be at it again. More than one day email outage, now national. Hey, it’s May — right on schedule!
Comment by peterh — 5/29/2008 @ 7:59 am