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A Nationwide Comcast Landline Outage is Affecting Thousands of Businesses (theverge.com)
Comcast's Xfinity phone service is apparently suffering a massive outage today, knocking out phone service for thousands of companies across the country that still largely rely on landline access to do business. From a report: According to DownDetector.com, Comcast phone service began experiencing issues around 8AM ET this morning and by the afternoon, areas around the country have started reporting disruptions. The areas most affected appear to be the Pacific Northwest, California, the tri-state area, and Florida. The official support Twitter account for Comcast Xfinity's residential and business services has acknowledged the issues, tweeting at 1PM ET today that some "customers may still be experiencing an issue with their Voice service," though Comcast has yet to release an official statement regarding the issue.
In other news the sky is still blue.
Phineas and Ferb hardest hit?
I havent had my robocalls today, they must be comcast customers
Would have a phone service that can go down as often as Comcast does. Good luck dialing 911 when in an emergency. The TOS for VoIP phone lines even cover this since it happens so often.
Of course it came as a required part of a bundle and I never hooked it up. But still, I'm happy to report no issues at all today!
love that bit of unnecessary sensationalism under the headline at the link, yeah duh, if the phone is down it won't call 911 either. Let's make it really spicy and say that "even calls to pro-Democrat fund raising and lobbyist organizations"
20 years ago your phone never went down, it just worked. Always...
I've just been on the phone with Comcast for over 2 hours. This is from Chicago down to Florida and spread all over. I have locations that I take care of across Georgia and Florida and every single Comcast location is affected. VoIP and landlines alike. They can't even forward the lines I need forwarded because their system has locked the Voice team out of that function.
This is the second time in, what?, 6 months or so that they've been hit with a vast, multi-state outage. We depend on fax lines (yes, still the most secure form of communication when it comes to HIPAA and related issues - plus the easiest to train/utilize), and my company will be missing everything from our affected locations for 4+ hours. Tens of thousands of dollars in immediate jeopardy with much more in possible losses to come.
Want to bet we won't even get a credit on our next bill? Ma Bell might have been a bastard monopolistic company, but copper lines in the ground had better up-time than a lot of what I've witnessed moving to VoIP and such technologies. Now get off my lawn, you're standing on the fiber lines.
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
NOPE!
Who forgot to turn of automatic windows updates again???
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Why is that news? It's been decades.
Which tri-state area? I guess all of them.
I used to crow about POTS reliability. 99.999% reliability. Until one day, I wanted to make a call, and the line was dead.
And the neighbors line was dead.
and the entire neighborhood was dead.
Dead, for 7 days.
Bell offered to credit us for the outage, $7 on a $49/Mo bill. $1 per day, thats what an outage was worth.
For $49/Mo for POTS service, on an outage lasting more than a few hours, I expect a company rep to hand deliver me a cellphone, with enough credit to talk all I want until the outage is resolved.
It was after that, I decided to move to VoIP, and get a cheap pay-as-you go cellphone, "just in case". Thus far, the VoIP has been very reliable.
I now pay $5.32/Mo for phone service, for all I can talk to Canada and the USA. Sure, my internet bill is higher, but:
-no long distance charges
-no usage limits
Comcast is important. I saw a Comcast tech getting the job done. I almost asked what he was doing but said nothing. Comcast Business. Comcast is good. But I need to learn more. Post from l0pht number too
Want some cheese with that whine? It seems you whine on every fucking story, so have some Limburger cheese... It'll smell better than you do HRC.
At roughly 2PM (the past few minutes), service is finally appearing to work again. It was out since start of day at this business at 8AM. Firstly, Comcast Business is not the same as Comcast / Xfinity in terms of service and reliability. I manage an office that uses Comcast Business, and this is the first major outage we've experience since getting the service years ago, save for one time an idiot from a different company literally cut the fiber line a block away from the building.
The phone service is VoIP based, not POTS based. There are very few companies that offer the level of service this business needed, and of those, competitors wanted over $1000/mo each, whereas Comcast is a fraction of that price. Yeah, inb4 "you get what you pay for" - other companies have outages too, they just don't make the front page because they're smaller entities that most have never heard of (our previous contract was with Integra)
Comcast service was not entirely out, only 99%ish out. Outgoing calls could not be made. Incoming calls from most providers would flat out fail. A few (Tmobile for example) would ring through, but voice would not exchange after pickup. I'm personally on Google's Project Fi with my cell phone and could ring through and talk perfectly (but again, could not call out to my phone from the business).
At roughly 2PM (the past few minutes), service is finally appearing to work again. It was out since start of day at this business at 8AM.
From what I can tell, this is a VOIP service. In our experience in three different cities, is that VOIP sucks. It's unreliable, and at times, the quality sucks. We just reverted to all POTS lines at all of our locations in the past few months. I think the key is that VOIP is a very complicated solution to a nonexistent problem. POTS works, and works well. VOIP requires layers and layers of shit to work properly, including tons of bandwidth.
I don't respond to AC's.
Comcast serves the Tri-State Area?
Seriously... do you realize how many tri-state areas there are within the United States? More than a dozen.
Now someone tell Comcast to stop installing self-destruct buttons on their VOIP-inators.
Xfinity phone service is VoIP, not "landlines", outages are expected (and common). If your phone is important to you, don't use VoIP... voice T1's are cheap these days and if you don't need all 24 voice lines, you can split it between voice and data and get a reliable (though slow) backup internet connection.
It's a firesale! Just like they demonstrated in Die Hard 4.0.
Some businesses around me in Northern Illinois said they were affected. I gave up on VOIP a long while ago because of the complexity. You not only rely on a broadband provider, but also other third party VOIP services. I guess most choose VOIP to save money, so I guess you get what you pay for with this stuff. Apparently Comcast has little ability to reroute to keep some service available. If your business depends on phones, don't skimp on who provides your VOIP service. Frankly Comcast wouldn't be my last choice with business services.
So, FAKE landlines. Not POTS with 5x9s uptime guaranteed by government regulation.
It's bad enough our phones don't work
We can't even get them forwarded to lines that do work
We can't login to Comcast business portal
We can't call Comcast business number and talk to a human there is literally no option for that.
For an outage of this size and duration there has been zero communication from Comcast other than to repeat what everyone already knew before calling... "experiencing an issue". Their main business website should have a statement of some kind or one should be buried somewhere. Literally NOTHING.
It's not the outage itself. It's the deliberate lack of any communication and playing games with their already rage inducing annoying as fuck "SAY yes or no" phone system so that you can never talk to a person that ticks me off the most.
Right now after being out for literally the entire day service is back slightly after COB yet our hunt groups no longer work and there is no way for me to talk to a human being about it.
to make it look like landlines are less dependable and get everyone off the landlines and onto cellular only because doing a phone tap on a landline is a lot more difficult than tapping a cellular call.
In the late 1960's, my dad was a lowly AT&T repairman in San Diego. He related to me the story of how a maintenance worked had used an improper tool (some kind of wrench wrapped in tape as an insulator instead of a dedicated cover) and dropped it across the bus-bars connecting the backup batteries. The wrench basically vaporized and managed to melt through the bus bars and shut down the switching center. He said it was really erie as this site that was normally vibrating due to all the mechanical switching activity was suddenly silent. He also mentioned this facility was supposed to be "nearly nuclear hit proof", so the sudden loss of it caused a bit of a panic.
How does this happen? The entire nationwide system has a single point of failure? No redundancy? No isolation?
Ridiculous!
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".