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Comcast Outages
This Comcast outage is what I was talking about a week ago. The problems I was having before the two big blowouts were DNS because I could ping the Comcast gateway, but was getting about 50% packet loss to the DNS machines. So, the question I have is this: did Comcast know of the problems early on and just didn’t get them cleared up before they became massive or were my problems early warning signs of problems that hadn’t reached “get the story in c|net” proportions?
Somehow I think it was the latter. Comcast was unable to use the information they were getting from customers like me because they were focused on treating symptoms rather than root causes. Being able to get that information and understand it could have saved lots of customers the outage and Comcast the embarrassment.
Posted by windley on April 14, 2005 2:44 PM
Comment from Another Comcast customer at April 14, 2005 3:17 PM
This reminds me of the first couple of weeks when AT&T Broadband was taking over from Excite. The DNS problems were so bad that, against my usual preference, I ended up setting up my own nameserver at my house. Looks like it's time I did that again. Grrr....
Comment from Nathan at April 14, 2005 8:37 PM
Can you even consider it "an" outage? Our comcast has been down off and on for the last week or so. It was often more than just the DNS server for us--often I couldn't even SSH to my work server by IP address!
Comment from Nick at April 15, 2005 7:53 AM
This has been going on for at least the past 4 weeks. When I finally got to speak with somebody they told me DNS issues in the area I was located but it seems more global to me. Then when it happened again I got told that they tried to add a backup DNS and that they had major problems that effected everybody.
I am sure that they expect us to pay for service that is not available 50% of the time.
Comment from Cid Dennis at April 15, 2005 8:18 AM
On my mac I never see DNS issues any more after setting up DNS Caching. Here is a link on a how to. Also my web browsing has gotten a lot faster as dns looks web from 30ms to 3ms.
http://www.macresistance.com/cgi-bin/r.cgi/tutorial_dns.html?OWNER=
Comment from Mike Gardner at April 18, 2005 10:17 AM
My greatest problem with Comcast in all this is how they lie to their customers. Everytime I've ever had a problem, it's always been "the modem". I think their service people are under orders to always blame it on the modem. They have replace 3 of them in 2 years. I'm moving on from them...I just don't trust them in any more.
Comment from Aqua at April 19, 2005 11:32 AM
I assume this is related but I have had similar problems, although it has effected both my cable TV service and Internet-- and it will completely go out--- sometimes for a minute, other times for longer. It seems to happen only at night, and happened moderately last night 4/18. Multiple calls and visit to my apartment and building from Comcast have shown it's nothing in my dwelling. Anyone have this problem with both TV and internet?