Comcast apologizes for widespread internet outages, now restoring service

Comcast Xfinity customers across the U.S. experienced rolling internet outages that started Monday night and continued Tuesday morning, according to internet analysts and user reports.

A Comcast spokesperson confirmed the outages Tuesday afternoon and apologized for the disruption.

“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. We apologize to those who were affected,” the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson declined to give further details on what caused the disruption.

By Tuesday afternoon, some customers who logged into their Xfinity accounts saw a message that "some customers experienced intermittent service interruptions as a result of a network issue," and that the issue had been addressed and service was being restored.

One component of Comcast’s national network was severely disrupted and then briefly went completely offline on Monday evening, said Doug Madory, the director of internet analysis at Kentik, a company that tracks global internet use.

Customers on the West Coast saw a major outage on Monday night. Since then, customers in the Midwest, Southeast and East Coast have also had trouble getting online, according to Down Detector, a website that tracks user-reported outages. Outage complaints dropped sharply after 11 a.m. ET, according to Down Detector.

Users across the country have experienced seemingly sporadic outages since then, Madory said, in unusual ways that don’t yet indicate a particular pattern.

“It’s randomly happening,” he said.

David Belson, the senior director of data insights at cloud computing provider Fastly, posted to Twitter that his company had seen disruptions in California, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Washington.

But the issues seemed to finally be resolving by Tuesday afternoon, he said.

"I haven't seen any other disruptions," Belson said.

Comcast owns NBCUniversal, the parent company of NBC News.