Comcast endures major Internet outage on the East Coast

November 29, 2010 By Aemon Malone

Comcast has since fixed the problem, but not before Twitter users began posting their own solutions.

Comcast’s Internet service suffered an outage on Sunday that left East Coast subscribers without online access for several hours. Complaints began to surface on Twitter late yesterday evening and appeared to be relegated to subscribers in Boston, Washington, DC, and the surrounding areas.

Shortly after reports of the outage began surfacing, some Twitter users began posting workarounds involving switching Domain Name System (DNS) settings. DNS works by translating the numerical Internet Protocol addresses into the domain names that humans can read (like www.digitaltrends.com). By flipping DNS settings from those Comcast provided to either OpenDNS or Google’s Public DNS users were able to restore connectivity.

Comcast announced that it had fixed the problem shortly after midnight and just in time for the official start of Cyber Monday, the Internet’s version of Black Friday. It’s not clear how many customers were affected by the outage or what the exact cause was, but neither cable television nor phone service appear to have been impacted.

Showing 12 comments

teamextension at 9:05am 30th November 2010 I was not affected since I was also using OpenDNS.
statikf at 8:12am 30th November 2010 lol. DNS failure is not an "outage" their internet was working they were just unable to resolve host to ip.
Song Seets at 6:16am 30th November 2010 Wow, I bet that must have been annoying! www.real-privacy.edu.tc
pictureaday at 5:16am 30th November 2010 I never even noticed the outtage, my dns servers are set to opendns by default! (Fredericksburg, VA)
Agent of Chaos at 4:56am 30th November 2010 The ISP I work for struggled with DNS capacity the last year. I bet it's either A) Sandvine-esque (packet shaping) software causing utilization issues, B) cheap ol' Comcast has put their DNS behind firewalls to do security on the cheap, or they simply ran out of IP's or the network wasn't robust enough to handle that many users during the Holiday weekend. It's okay, free advertising, right Comcast? :D
harrydorf at 12:31am 30th November 2010 they ruined a perfectly good raid event in an mmo!
@krichardsays at 11:56pm 29th November 2010 apparently my area had an outage due to this as well, but not me *pats OpenDNS on the back*
1. TomBombadil at 1:30am 30th November 2010 opendns is a scam. you're much better off using a service that does not manipulate your DNS results for their own profit. you know opendns is a private company and that's how they make their money, right? probably not, since they try to hide that fact.
  1. Jinx at 9:46am 30th November 2010 Oh no a company is trying to make a money of their hard work ....
  2. MRK at 1:06pm 30th November 2010 OMG, they try to make money to pay for their free service? I can't believe this, the tyranny! The thought that mistyping a URL results in a search page where they can collect funds to support all the free stuff they give us is hardly a bad thing.
gee at 11:47pm 29th November 2010 why would you use your isps dns servers anyway
jimbe at 2:03pm 29th November 2010 I was out from about 9:00 until after midnight