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A similar DNS-related issue caused Comcast subscribers on the East Coast to lose Internet connectivity one week ago.

For the second time in a week, Comcast customers found themselves unable to connect to the Internet. This time, it was Comcast subscribers in the Midwest who had to endure a Sunday evening without being able to use their Internet service. Portions of four states were affected: Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, and Minnesota.  The outage began around 8:30 PM on Sunday and lasted until around midnight. Comcast apologized for the problem through a customer service Twitter account.

Just a week before, on the eve of Cyber Monday, Comcast subscribers in areas in and around Washington, D.C. and Boston found they were unable connect to the Internet for several hours throughout the evening.

Both of the outages are blamed on glitches with Comcast’s Domain Name System (DNS), the system which translates IP addresses into their corresponding domain names. In both cases, users were able to reconfigure their Internet settings to use a alternative DNS settings — like OpenDNS or Google’s Public DNS, — in order restore connectivity. Comcast subscribers already configured to use different DNS settings were not affected by the outage. Cable TV and phone service were also unaffected.

Showing 4 comments

  1. Scott Barbour at 10:47am 6th December 2010 Where I live, as a Comcast subscriber, my internet (and voice service) was out last night even though I was using OpenDNS. The cable modem completely lost connection. Later into the evening, the internet connection was restored, but then the television service was out.
  2. a bedoya at 10:29am 6th December 2010 Good grief. Use another DNS server. For example, Google Open DNS 8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4
  3. Marlon Stevenson at 10:28am 6th December 2010 Don't forget that Virginia was also affected. And luckily I found out that it was just a DNS server problem and was able to reconfigure my settings, because this actually happens once a day here!!
  4. Comcast Subscriber at 10:26am 6th December 2010 And that's why, as a comcast subscriber, I don't use Comcast's DNS servers.
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