Comcast: Service Outage Caused by Fiber Cuts – May Impact Other Providers
Comcast: Service Outage Caused by Fiber Cuts – May Impact Other Providers
Comcast said Friday that the hours-long interruption of its internet, video and voice services, was caused two separate and unrelated fiber cuts to the company’s large network providers. The company is working to restore services.
We identified 2 unrelated fiber cuts to our network backbone providers. Our engineers are restoring services to business & residential internet, tv & voice customers. Apologies to those affected. If still having issue, use https://t.co/P6Ac7dZ5h4 to DM.
— ComcastCares (@comcastcares) June 29, 2018
“We identified two, separate and unrelated fiber cuts to our network backbone providers. Our engineers worked to address the issue immediately and services are now being restored to business and residential internet, video and voice customers. We again apologize to anyone who was impacted.”
Comcast is speaking to investment banks about obtaining bridge financing for an all-cash bid to displace Walt Disney on its $52 billion deal to acquire most of Twenty-First Century Fox’s assets, three people familiar with the matter said on Monday
The company did not specify which providers were impacted.
A source told CNBC that one of the cuts occurred in CenturyLink’s network.
CenturyLink said its network is operating normally but said there were fiber cuts in its network Friday.
Initially, Comcast had said a single “fiber cut” had been affecting its customers, as well as other providers.
Customers in Philadelpha, Baltimore and elsewhere on the east coast reported outages of internet and video service on Twitter and on Internet monitoring site Downdetector.com, where outage reports began arriving just after 12:30 p.m. ET.
Other reports of outages from Comcast customers were from Seattle, San Francisco and Atlanta, according to Downdetector.com. CNBC, a network within Comcast-owned NBC Universal, first reported the outage.
We're working as quickly as possible to have service restored, we don't have an ETA at this time. ~DB
— ComcastCares (@comcastcares) June 29, 2018
“While the CenturyLink network continues to operate normally, on June 29, we experienced two isolated fiber cuts in North Carolina affecting some customers that by themselves did not cause the issues experienced by other providers. At this time, our technicians are working to restore the services,” the company said in a statement.
Comcast reported last quarter it serves 29.6 million total business and residential customers. It is the second largest U.S. pay TV provider, behind AT&T, since its DirecTV acquisition.
Comcast is one of the nation’s largest pay-TV providers with more than 22 million subscribers, and the largest broadband provider with more than 26 million subscribers, according to Leichtman Research Group. The company also provides broadband and video to more than 2 million businesses.
San Francisco-based Network monitoring and intelligence firm ThousandEyes began seeing network issues across the Net beginning about 12:15 p.m. ET. By about 4:30 p.m. ET, network issues were appearing to be resolved, the firm said.
Xfinity, the digital TV and home Internet service was severely impacted by today's major Comcast outage — check out how it evolved over the course of an hour #ComcastOutage pic.twitter.com/1Jqd4hUKhs
— ThousandEyes (@thousandeyes) June 29, 2018
Many internet users beyond Comcast’s own 25 million subscriber base were affected, too, according to ThousandEyes. That’s because other traffic travels across the provider’s network, because it serves as part of the backbone connecting various regions of the nation. “This is a really good illustration of how interconnected a lot of these networks are,” said Angelique Medina, senior product marketing manager at ThousandEyes.
“It is kind of like a domino effect. Any one provider can potentially have a big impact on a number of users,” she said. “In this case, because it was Comcast, the blast radius was just massive.”
News Source: usatoday.com, cnbc.com
