Comcast customers across Chicago, Philadelphia and parts of New Jersey suffered widespread broadband outages on Tuesday morning, just a day after users in San Francisco faced a similar predicament.
Data from outage tracking website Downdetector showed more than 53,000 people had reported issues with their Xfinity service as of Tuesday morning. An internet outage map from Cisco-owned network monitoring company ThousandEyes also reflected the issues in both cities and New Jersey. Police in the central New Jersey town of South Brunswick verified on Twitter residents were hit by a “Comcast outage affecting many customers in New Jersey and beyond.”
The cause of the outages was not immediately clear, and users on Twitter complained about a lack of communication from the operator about the issues. Comcast had not yet posted a public statement about the issues as of publication.
Other sources indicated customers in parts of Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire were also experiencing issues with their Xfinity service.
In a tweet addressing a customer complaint about service interruptions in Chicago, Comcast’s Xfinity Support account confirmed “we are experiencing widespread interruptions to the Xfinity Services” but said it was “working to resolve the issue.” The operator attributed the issues to an unspecified "network issue" in a subsequent tweet and said it was continuing to investigate. At 11:09 a.m. Eastern time, it said the issue affecting service was "resolving" and encouraged users to check whether they were back online.
At 12:10 p.m., a Comcast representative sent the following statement to Fierce: “Earlier, some customers experienced intermittent service disruptions as a result of a network issue. We have addressed the issue and service is now restoring for impacted customers, as we continue to investigate the root cause. We apologize to those who were affected.”
The Chicago and East Coast outages came shortly after Comcast service went down across wide swaths of the San Francisco Bay area on Monday evening.
RELATED: ThousandEyes provides postmortem look at CenturyLink's outage
In August 2020, CenturyLink suffered a widespread network outage across the U.S. that impacted sites including Amazon, Cloudflare and Hulu. In the aftermath, ThousandEyes released a report attributing that incident to a problematic Flowspec update on the network which blocked establishment of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) sessions and in turn impeded traffic routing.
This is a developing story and will be updated as more information becomes available.