Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Communications IT Technology

A Nationwide Comcast Landline Outage is Affecting Thousands of Businesses (theverge.com) 97

Posted by msmash from the hello?-can-you-hear-me? dept.
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.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

A Nationwide Comcast Landline Outage is Affecting Thousands of Businesses More

A Nationwide Comcast Landline Outage is Affecting Thousands of Businesses

Comments Filter:
  • Phineas and Ferb hardest hit?

    • Obviously, the tri-state area can only mean the Cincinnati area. There are no other points on the map where 3 states meet. /sarc

      • Well, it does rule out the four corners region.

      • Obviously, the tri-state area can only mean the Cincinnati area. There are no other points on the map where 3 states meet. /sarc

        Just in case someone overlooks the "sarcasm" tag... here's why it was a sarcastic comment

        Massachussetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island.

        Oklahoma, New Mexico, Texas.

        Oregon, California, Nevada.

        Montana, Idaho, Wyoming.

        I could go on...

      • My home is near the border of three states. I work and live in one state, and I go shopping in an other. The third state, doesn't have close by major towns, so I don't go there much.

    • Yea it is kind of ambiguous, for those interested these are the main ones in the US:Tri-state areas [wikipedia.org].

  • Less robbo callers today (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I havent had my robocalls today, they must be comcast customers

  • 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"

    • Re:hahaha "even 911 calls" (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06, 2018 @04:31PM (#56738940)

      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.

      • 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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sjames ( 1099 )

      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.

      • 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.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by sjames ( 1099 )

          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.

        • nonsense, 911 centers do locate cell phones. in some situations the location may not be exact, but that happens with VOIP calls too.

      • 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.

  • and 20 years ago this was unheard of (Score:4, Insightful)

    by theNetImp ( 190602 ) on Wednesday June 06, 2018 @04:20PM (#56738878)

    20 years ago your phone never went down, it just worked. Always...

    • 20 years ago your phone never went down, it just worked. Always...

      ... on the other hand, you could only use it within a few feet of the wall jack - depending on how long your handset cord was. And if you had a wireless handset (as most people did by then), you were SOL even if the phone line itself was technically still up.

      We kept an old Bell Slimline phone plugged into the phone jack in the bedroom for exactly this reason.

    • Somebody doesn't remember the joy of fast busy, indicating that there were no available lines for your call to transit.

      • I remember the old party lines. I'd lift the receiver and hear someone else talking on the phone. Yes, I'm that old.

        • Shit, I remember visiting a rural relative about, oh, twenty, maybe twenty-five years ago, still had a party line.

          I also remember having 'pen pals' which involved writing on special extra-thin paper, envelopes with red and blue stripes on the border, and waiting six to eight weeks to reply.

    • 20 years ago your phone never went down, it just worked. Always...

      That isn't even remotely true.

  • Not just Florida... (Score:5, Informative)

    by fallen1 ( 230220 ) on Wednesday June 06, 2018 @04:23PM (#56738888) Homepage

    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.

    • I;m dealing with pretty much the same scenario in Western WA.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      sending unecrypted faxes over phone lines is the most secure method? bahaha.

      https://luxsci.com/blog/hipaa-fax-breach-health-care-finally-stop-faxing.html

    • That puts a damper on my initial feeling of schadenfreude upon seeing Comcast outage.

      Yes, I hate Comcast, but it's their business customers that are being hurt here.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by brausch ( 51013 )

      Actually where I used to work, we got lots of misdirected medical faxes. Our phone number was just 1 digit off from one of the local clinics and our fax machine would receive medical reports it wasn't supposed to. We'd call them and let them know then feed it to the shredder. So faxes may or may not be "the most secure form of communication when it comes to HIPAA" but it is far from foolproof.

  • Who forgot to turn of automatic windows updates again???

  • Which tri-state area? I guess all of them.

  • some points of info (Score:5, Informative)

    by darkain ( 749283 ) on Wednesday June 06, 2018 @05:07PM (#56739190) Homepage

    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.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Except that the FCC no longer requires companies maintain POTS. That is why you'll see T1s becoming increasingly difficult to get, its why ISDN is almost impossible. Even when you do get a "POTS" it is just pots to the CO where it becomes VOIP and has been for over a decade now. VOIP in and of itself is not a problem.

      I deployed and ran an Asterisk/FreePBX solution which was all VOIP all the time. I had a SIP provider that was solid and a PRI T1 I kept as backup. My users never had any issues for about 8 ye

  • Comcast serves the Tri-State Area [wikia.com]?

    Seriously... do you realize how many tri-state areas there are within the United States? More than a dozen [wikipedia.org].

    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.

  • Comcast sucks ass (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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. Lite

  • How does this happen? The entire nationwide system has a single point of failure? No redundancy? No isolation?

    Ridiculous!

Slashdot Top Deals

He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion

Close