Another day, another Internet outage. How fickle is the heart of technology! A slew of unhappy customers just about blew up Comcast’s Twitter on Monday, as subscribers across the country reported widespread outages, affecting everything from Comcast’s high-definition TV channels to downed land lines to Wi-Fi issues and on to Xfinity problems — really, the list goes on. A stunning 17,000 outage reports were logged during the peak frustration hours, which occurred between 9 am and 12 pm ET on Monday, with a number of customers expressing serious concerns about the lack of customer service representation available to provide help.
A heat map from the trusty Down Detector showed that outages affected, quite literally encompassing most of the nation’s urban centers — while much of the eastern seaboard seemed more heavily impacted at the worst of the outages, there also appeared to be major issues out west and in Colorado, Utah, and Texas.
In the firm’s first statement, issued at 12:30 pm ET, Comcast said, “We’re continuing to investigate what appears to be a temporary network interruption that impacted some of our services this morning. Our engineers have been working on this and services are starting to be restored. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused our customers.”
Just under an hour later, the company returned to report that they’d “repaired the temporary network interruption that impacted some of our services this morning,” and that their engineers were continuing “to work on this issue and almost all services have already been restored.” Still, the most recent heat map from Down Detector suggests that’s not totally the case.
Ironically, during the worst of the outage, Comcast’s own support page was down, leading to further messages of annoyance from peeved Americans. And a number of individuals who called in to report their issues were dismayed to find that, unsurprisingly, all lines were busy, and that no one was available to provide assistance … yet.
Although Comcast has apologized for the inconvenience, there’s no word yet on whether it’ll be doing anything else to assuage complaints. It could, of course, take a page from Telstra’s book and provide some free data (or the equivalent). But in any case, if your Internet is down, don’t despair. At least you’re not alone.
