RSSSecond Night of Outages Hit Comcast
By Ed Oswald | Published April 14, 2005, 10:06 AM
Comcast High Speed Internet subscribers again found themselves without Internet service for the second night in a row and the third time in two weeks as "server problems" plagued the cable provider once again.
The latest round of troubles is causing several subscribers to begin to look elsewhere for broadband Internet service, or ways to get around Comcast's broken servers.
Instructions were posted on Comcast's help forums by subscribers giving detailed instructions on how to deal with the problem. Many users found success in accessing the Internet by changing the domain name servers (DNS) -- the computers responsible for telling Internet traffic where it needs to go -- in their Internet settings.
The renewed problems were an inconvenience for many users. "I have a three page research paper due tomorrow and I can't research it, thanks Comcast," a user by the name of Andy G from Reading, Pennsylvania posted to the forums.
Users also questioned Comcast's network setup, which has all customers using the same DNS. "This just isn't good design. The Internet is designed to be redundant. Why are the people in Oregon using the same DNS server as I am using in Southern NJ?" an anonymous poster wrote.
Comcast spokesperson Jeanne Russo told BetaNews that the company was working as fast as possible to stabilize service for its customers. "Our team is in the process of implementing a number of additional engineering fixes that we believe will solve the problem going forward," Russo said.
When asked what the company's plans for compensation for the downtime would be, Russo said such a decision would come on a market-by-market basis.
In response to the Comcast DNS outages of last week, DynDNS has developed a recursive DNS service. Read more about it at http://www.dyndns.org/services/dns/recursivedns/
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|4th night. Here in Portland, 6:18 a.m. PDT
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|Adelphia, just upgraded our speeds for FREE...wow!!!! I LOVE IT!!! 4 years highspeed customer...adelphia :)
btw, only time we had down time was when they upgraded our the servers, and ummm about 2 hrs or so, oh yah..last years hurricanes had us down, but that dont count cuz it was a natural disaster ;)
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|Adelphia where I used to live was living, breathing CRAP and everyone changed to DSL when they could. So either you're a liar, or extremely lucky. Adelphia not only had bad internet - cable went out a few times weekly (and thus net'). I didn't ever use the service as I couldn't bother with changing over from DSL (Bellsouth) to Cable (lucky me) - but my cousin had it for 2 years and then dropped it for dialup (yeah) and now he's on DSL.
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|I dont know how this works but my Trillian (aim service) works perfectly but when i try to browse the web i can't even get google to load. Sometimes it works but the speeds are worse than dialup. Othertimes it just wont load. Its working pretty good now, they just upped our speed to 4mb/sec like 1 week ago, maybe that was causing the issue.
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|AIM connects only to one server and ip of that server is likely stored in cache so DNS server which is used to get ip from a name like www.google.com is not needed. That's why even if DNS server dies, programs that connect directly to some IP address will still work.
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|I would have to find me a company with higher standards or I would do without. I wouldn't want to rely on a company that has that many problems in that short of a time.
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|Man, that's a really helpful suggestion. However, here in the real world, some of us do not have the option to "do without".
I have to succumb to the evils of Comcast. In my area, they are the cheapest combined solution. My area has not achieved cable deregulation yet. Comcast purchased the only provider in my area.
Yes, I can go to a DSL/Satelite solution, but I'm screwed there too. Alltel is the only DSL provider. Other ISP's can lease the lines through Alltel, but Alltel doesn't cut them any deals.
Cuck Forporations.
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|I don't have another option. And in my experience the xDSL options are much worse, with outages lasting much longer and complete connectivity loss, not just DNS.
Come on Verizon/whomever with fiber! I have never had any love for cable, internet or not.
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|I will stay the course. Comcast has been better than any provider I've used. This, hopefully is a glitch, there could be sabotage or they could have grown faster than their capabilities. I'm sure this will all get worked out.
My concern is the call center representatives are not getting the current state of the system.
When I called over the past three instances they were clearly in the dark as to how widespread the problem had become. This is unfair to them and us. Admit the short-comings and go forward.
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|I think people who use Comcast must be a bit soft in the head. I feel that i can get away with saying that as Comcast customers can't get on the internet to look at my comment anyway :-)
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|this appears to be a Syn-Flood attack on Comcasts DNS servers at a specific time. We just found a trojan on our internal network that did the same thing.. It seeks out the DNS servers and floods the hell out of them.
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|I agree that Comcast has been a great service. Network outages like that happen. I've been in the corporate IT industry for around 20 years, and I don't blame them at all for this. I'm actually very impressed at their overall uptime. Keeping up with all the newest virus's/worms, patches, etc., is a nightmare for any large company, let alone one that services so many end-users like Comcast does. Let's just leave them alone and let them fix the problem the way they see best. Everybody who's complaining about a refund should just be happy that it works the other 99% of the year. Keep up the good work Comcast!
Greg in NJ
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|It doesn't take more than, oh, 5 minutes worth of effort of a team consulting senior management to put a notice on their site about it.
Sorry but can you imagine the telcos having this attitude if they were even down 5 minutes? It doesn't happen. They are regulated and it's actually been pretty good for the economy that it was regulated (in the past... I don't know about now)
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|As much of a pain in the arse this outage has been...I seriously hope it brings a lot of attention to the lack of caring comcast has for it's internet customers and how crappy their customer service really is. I wish this company would get the bad publicity it deserved so that the bigwigs upstairs would actually try to fix the issue and change the image of the company.
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|Who the hell do you blame? Get a clue buddy.
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|Yea right! Your taalking about comcast know their history before you speak pal.
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|Some times it is not about price, it's about convience and reliability that is what your paying for and NOT getting.
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|The problem with Comcast is they are too big...so unfortunately because of this they have tons of call centers...and like any company that becomes too big its time to outsource to another company or even country so they think to resolve customers complaints is by increasing their speeds so its faster then anyone else which is only a temporary fi x and last I checked comcast was also still using attbi servers as well which had constant problems to begin with. I moved so comcast is not in my area, I have options as to what cable company I would like which makes it nice and I dont't have to rely on the bigger companies.
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