Comcast restored service outage in Boston and other East Coast systems on Sunday night, believed to be caused by DNS server issues

Jeff Baumgartner, Senior Editor

November 29, 2010

1 Min Read
Comcast Hit by Regional Net Outage

Comcast Corp. (Nasdaq: CMCSA, CMCSK) suffered a regional Internet outage Sunday night that left customers in Boston; Washington, D.C.; and Baltimore without service for roughly three hours.

The MSO restored the outage, believed to be caused by a domain name system (DNS)-related server problem, by late Sunday, the eve of "Cyber Monday," when millions of consumers are expected to take to the Web to buy holiday gifts.

Comcast has yet to publicly identify the root cause, but acknowledged that it was investigating so it can avoid any similar outages.

Comcast was not immediately available for comment on the outage Monday morning, but "ComcastWill" Tweeted that engineers were still working to resolve the issue.

In October, Comcast began to migrate customers to DNS servers outfitted with Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC), a component of the MSO's "Constant Guard" bot detection and notification service. (See Comcast Goes Wide With PC Security Bot.)

Comcast is using DNSSEC to verify that the "signatures" of domain names that are signed into Comcast's DNS servers are valid. The MSO has added that extra layer of security to ensure that customers aren't automatically routed to domains that have been tampered with by hackers.

Comcast, which started the migration in parts of its Virginia network, expects to complete it by the early part of 2011.

But outages like Sunday's don't bode well for Comcast's effort. Several users in the affected areas reported that they were able to restore access by switching to DNS servers from OpenDNS.

— Jeff Baumgartner, Site Editor, Light Reading Cable

About the Author(s)

Jeff Baumgartner

Senior Editor, Light Reading

Jeff Baumgartner is a Senior Editor for Light Reading and is responsible for the day-to-day news coverage and analysis of the cable and video sectors. Follow him on X and LinkedIn.

Baumgartner also served as Site Editor for Light Reading Cable from 2007-2013. In between his two stints at Light Reading, he led tech coverage for Multichannel News and was a regular contributor to Broadcasting + Cable. Baumgartner was named to the 2018 class of the Cable TV Pioneers.

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