Comcast Suffers Three Outages In A Week

The outages started April 7 and continued on Tuesday and again on Wednesday, affecting customers' ability to get on the Internet and access e-mail, a spokeswoman said. The problems lasted from three to five hours only in the evening.

Some customers had normal Internet access, while others had none at all, or only intermittently, Russo said. Other subscribers experienced connections slower than normal.

"It was intermittent and varied," Comcast spokeswoman Jeanne Russo said of the service.

The outages were related to "issues" with the company's domain name system, which makes it possible for customers' computers to locate websites and send and receive e-mail. Comcast is upgrading its network, but it's not clear whether the recent problems are related.

"We're still working on these issues, so they don't reoccur," Russo said, declining to give further details.

On Thursday, the Comcast network was operating normally, Russo said.

"Right now, to the best of my knowledge, all our customers have full Internet access," she said.

Philadelphia-based Comcast operates in 35 states and is the nation's largest cable operator. The company has more than 7 million subscribers to its Internet service.

People who appeared to be Comcast customers expressed their anger Thursday over the interruptions in a forum on Broadbandreports.com.

"People are stick (sic) of paying for service with such technical issues," one person said.

Others chastised Comcast for providing vague status reports on the problems.

"Comcast continues to suffer from the inability to communicate effectively with their customers where service disruptions are concerned," another person said. "I mean this is a basic requirement for any communications company."

Russo said the company posted updates on its subscriber portal, and through a pre-recorded message on its toll-free, customer service number.

Other people pointed out that the latest outages occurred at a time when many people were doing last-minute, electronic tax filings.

"Think about the noobs -- the poor noobs who will not be able to file taxes and get audited by the IRS!" one person wrote. In slang, a noob is a person who is new online or unfamiliar with the Internet.