Oh, Comcast. An Xfinity customer and working from home? Maybe not this morning

Where were you during the Great Comcast Outage?

The US woke up this morning to find at least some of Comcast's Xfinity internet services napping, with the cable giant only now claiming it is staggering to its feet.

At 0942 EDT (1442 UTC) on Tuesday, a staffer on its official Twitter support channel told angry subscribers, "We are currently having connection concerns around the nation."

Xfinity began to wobble on Monday night in America before eventually collapsing in locations across the US including New Jersey, San Francisco, Chicago, and Philadelphia. Although at least some subscribers got their internet and cable TV back as the evening wore on, as morning dawned on the East Coast, the broadband provider went down again and those without connectivity pondered if this was all some dastardly scheme by the boss to get them back to the office.

Hours later, many were still struggling to get back online. Xfinity support folk said just minutes ago: "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."

Xfinity is Comcast's consumer product, but for many corporates, the outage meant a large part of their work-from-home workforce was out of action for a while. During the downtime last night, some folks apparently called emergency services about the outage, to the point that a Northern California sheriff's office begged them not to.

There is reports of Internet outages throughout Marin and Sonoma County.

Please do not call 911 to ask why your Internet is out. Call your internet service provider. pic.twitter.com/Re5Eb560Gm

— Marin County Sheriff (@MarinSheriff) November 9, 2021

So severe was the problem that even the cableco's outage map fell over.

When @Xfinity has an outage their outage map is also down. Brilliant. pic.twitter.com/XTodI8af7a

— Sergey Morozov (@morozgrafix) November 9, 2021

Not to worry though, Morozov later got a text from the biz saying there was no outage. No, honest. "Nothing to see here people," he observed, "It's all fine."

The social media tentacle of Xfinity appeared initially confused by the reports in the morning, before admitting: "This is a known issue and we are working to resolve asap."

Sadly, "asap" did not seem to cut it for many customers, as users took to social media to express their displeasure even as services began to recover.

I am honored to be part of the nationwide Comcast outage this morning. Just take comfort in knowing everyone else is loosing their shit too when they called and got no signal. Love it #outage #comcastoutage #comcastdown #Comcast

— Dinowars (@Dinowars_) November 9, 2021

The worst affected areas appear to be Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area in the west of the US, and New Jersey and Pennsylvania in the east. Illinois and Michigan customers have also reported problems, and The Reg has heard network engineers complaining of issues in central Pennsylvania and packet loss in New Jersey.

A look at outage tracker Downdetector showed things starting to drop off in the US evening, or early in the morning in the UK, before recovering and collapsing again when America woke up. Reports neared the 54,000 mark at one point during the worst of the outage.

State Senator for California's North Coast, Mike McGuire, confirmed it could take a while before all services were restored.

Comcast is starting to get customers back up and running from the Bay Area wide internet outage.

Full restoration could take some time across the region.

Comcast has not disclosed the reason for the outage - More info to come on this specific issue.

— Mike McGuire (@ilike_mike) November 9, 2021

Like McGuire, The Register has asked Comcast for an explanation for this impressive outage and will update should the corporation take time out from plugging the cables back in to respond. ®