Comcast residential and business customers from coast to coast are experiencing a loss of service on Friday afternoon. The outage affects internet, cable, and voice phone services for residential and business customers across the US, according to Comcast’s customer service team on Twitter.
The cause of the outage is a cut fiber cable, according to the statement Comcast put out on the issue.
“One of Comcast’s large backbone network partners had a fiber cut that we believe is also impacting other providers,” Comcast’s customer service account tweeted. “It is currently affecting our business and residential internet, video and voice customers. We apologize & are working to get services restored as soon as possible.”
The community-sourced Down Detector shows outages in every major city across the US, showing there isn’t much of a regional pattern. Cities including San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, Atlanta, Washington, New York, and Pittsburgh reported the most problems.
The problem initially looked like an internet-wide outage not solely related to Comcast, as users initially reported services like Netflix, Facebook, and YouTube were all down. Assuming that one of the major “backbone” fiber cables was cut, other services may have been able to shift the load onto different peering providers or data centers, something that Comcast would struggle to do for all its customers.
There’s no timeline on when the problem will be resolved, so be nice to your data plan right now in case the outage continues into the evening. If you see reports that service has been restored but you’re not getting a connection, rebooting your cable box or cable modem can often help.
