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.
