Reports first seemed to surface on Twitter last night from Comcast customers tweeting that their Internet service had gone down. Comcast's own customer service Twitter feed, known as Comcastcares, confirmed the outage, initially pointing to an issue in Boston but soon revealing that the problem was more widespread.
Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas told CNET through e-mail that last night Comcast engineers identified a server issue that affected Internet service for customers primarily in the Boston and D.C./Beltway areas.
Though the outage focused on Boston and Washington, D.C., a Comcast customer service technician reportedly told NBC News that there were "significant Internet outages" in Connecticut, Maryland, Virginia, Massachusetts, New York, and New Hampshire, according to MSNBC.com.
Douglas told CNET that Internet service was impacted for a few hours last night before being restored. He added that Internet access is working properly this morning, but Comcast engineers are carefully monitoring the service. Douglas added that Comcast apologizes to customers affected by the outage.
The problem seemed to center on Comcast's DNS servers, which handle the conversion between IP addresses and their domain names. Several Comcast users on Twitter said they were able to regain Internet access after replacing the entries on their PCs for Comcast's DNS servers with those of the DNS servers offered by Google or OpenDNS.
Douglas told CNN that it was unclear exactly how many customers were affected by the outage and that the cause was still being determined.
Though Comcast is reporting that the problem has been resolved, some Twitter users are saying their Internet connections remain down. Douglas advises that customers still without access should reboot or power down and power up their cable modems, echoing the instructions from Comcast support reps.
Comcast Customer Service
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