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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.
Phineas and Ferb hardest hit?
I havent had my robocalls today, they must be comcast customers
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
In the pre-VoIP days when phone lines were hard-wired into the central office, you were always able to pick up the phone and get a dialtone to at least dial the operator or call 911. The VoIP part is the big difference since you need all 7 OSI layers in place before you can even think about making a call. POTS central offices had batteries providing backup power and the system was designed to be as resilient as possible...but you can't do much more than voice with a system like that.
Which tri-state area? I guess all of them.
That's not true about only being able to do voice -- many countries run 50-100 mbps VDSL over twisted-pair copper. It just has to be properly maintained, not be neglected 1920s-era paper-insulated circuits.
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 not sensationalism. In that location, you cannot call 911 on any phone, Comcast or not, because the 911 call center itself is down. In other areas, naturally your Comcast line can't call 911 (or anything else), but your cellphone would still work.
I work at 9-1-1.
EVERYONE should have a landline, even if you never use it. The day you need it for 9-1-1, you'll be glad.
See, it's not just the reliability of landline...it's the instant and infallible (mostly) address lookup.
Any other calling service, IP phones, VoIP software, cellular, radio, satellite...you have a slim chance of the address appearing instantly on the dispatcher's screen. A few seconds can be the difference between dying and living. Also, FYI many calls include a caller who CAN'T say where they are due to suffering, bleeding, screaming, fear, being chased, burning flames, etc. YOU WANT YOUR ADDRESS TO APPEAR AUTOMATICALLY.
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.
This needs a +5. Sadly I have none to contribute to this INSIGHTFUL comment.
Actually I should have typed INFORMATIVE
but your cellphone would still work
But as someone in a higher thread noted, if you become incapacitated, your call for help will likely not be traceable.
Good luck ordering POTS nowadays. Everything is going VoIP. I mean in MA you can't get POTS service anymore from VZW. Cellular has come quite a way. Yes, it may not be foolproof, but you may not be at home when you keel over from a heart attack, what good is your landline going to do when you can't reach it?
That's not the same situation as call 911, nothing happens though. That's why reporting that especially bad situation was not at all an attempt to sensationalize.
Posting AC because I just modded it up to +5.
See, it's not just the reliability of landline...it's the instant and infallible (mostly) address lookup.
Or we could join the 21st century and actually send our GPS coordinates or other location service information to 911 operators.
Personally there are plenty of seconds saved NOT having to go find a landline. Plus in many countries the 911 operator will actually talk you through what to do which works exceptionally well when you're not forced to leave the victim.
It is safer to wait for tech to close this small vulnerability than to shoulder the social burden of having a landline.
It's like AOL
tone
no. wrong.
If you actually read the article, the police put out a message saying customers wouldn't be able to reach 911 center if they had comcast voip, to use cell phone instead.
wow, you swallow the sensationalism hook, line and sinker. hope you have a good spam and ad blocker so you don't go bankrupt believing the B.S. you'd read.
nonsense, 911 centers do locate cell phones. in some situations the location may not be exact, but that happens with VOIP calls too.
I work at 9-1-1.
EVERYONE should have a landline, even if you never use it. The day you need it for 9-1-1, you'll be glad.
See, it's not just the reliability of landline...it's the instant and infallible (mostly) address lookup.
Any other calling service, IP phones, VoIP software, cellular, radio, satellite...you have a slim chance of the address appearing instantly on the dispatcher's screen. A few seconds can be the difference between dying and living. Also, FYI many calls include a caller who CAN'T say where they are due to suffering, bleeding, screaming, fear, being chased, burning flames, etc. YOU WANT YOUR ADDRESS TO APPEAR AUTOMATICALLY.
I once saw a youtube video of someone trying to call 911 after a home invasion. He was tied and gagged and it was fun him trying to explain what happened and where he was to the operator.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
My family knows CPR
Awesome, your family should know how to sustain a heart attack victim until a paramedic arrives. I assume, since you don't like "worthless government services", you are going to call around each hospital to find one with an ambulance available?
I have a pond with several thousand gallons of water and two trash pumps that can do about 250 gallons per minute each.
Also awesome, probably useful to help keep things in check until the professionals arrive with the proper tools. Unless you have heat resistant gear, SCBAs, ladder trucks, multiple hoses, nozzles and a bunch of friends ready jump at a minute's notice too?
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".
maybe not always, but you didn't hear about it 6-8 times a year either. I can't tell you how many times my relatives have complained about their VOIP phones being down because fo Comcast.