Another Comcast Internet Outage Hits Midwest Users

By: William Fenton

Contrary to the jet stream that brought flurries to Manhattan this morning, Comcast's latest Internet outage rolled west, stranding subscribers in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Minnesota for nearly five hours last night. As with the Comcast East Coast outage of November 28, DNS again played the grinch Sunday, downing Web service from 7:30 to midnight CST.

Comcast support, admittedly "flooded" with outage tweets, worked to address the issue and communicate updates via its Twitter feed. For those unable to access the Twitter feed—a peculiar means of disseminating information to customers without Internet access, there was the support number, 1-800-Comcast, which played a recorded message explaining that the company was experiencing technical difficulties and to call back later. While the broadband Internet provider struggled to restore DNS service, savvy subscribers could work around the issue by using OpenDNS. Changing DNS servers to 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 seemed to restore connectivity.

Among those affected were hundreds of off-campus students at Northwestern University, many of whom were studying for Finals Week at the time, the Daily Northwestern reported.

On November 28, a similar Internet outage lasting several hours rolled across the East Coast, disconnecting users from New Hampshire to Virginia. Last year, Comcast struggled with its SmartZone e-mail service. We previously reported outages in both April 2009 and August 2009. Certainly, company is cold comfort for those who rely upon the service.