My parents, who are Comcast customers gave me the heads up on this one. They were without Internet access on Sunday night. I think this will probably fly fairly under the radar because Comcast was lucky enough to experience outages outside traditional business hours.
According to PC Magazine, the Comcast outage knocked out subscribers in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Minnesota for nearly 5 hours. The problem, they report, is similar to one experienced in the eastern states earlier in the week and was related to DNS (Domain Name Servers).
Comcast kept folks updated with their Twitter feed, which as PC Magazine pointed out, was a peculiar choice for folks without Internet access.
I suffered a bit from the outage. Surfing just fine, then nothing. Of course, the first impulse is to start messing with my router and computer.
I do have to say that outages are quite rare with my Comcast service. The impact of the outage was also mitigated by my access to email over my Blackberry.
I saw no outage because I don’t use the Comcast DNS service. In fact, I was rather confused to read about it while it was happening. One can use any of hundreds of DNS servers (one of the nice things about DNS) to avoid these (rare) problems…
Chris – you might have to write up the instructions for folks. 🙂
It’s a good point and a demonstration of the decentralized nature of the Internet.