Fiber Cuts Lead To Big Outages

Comcast’s reported outage at 1:35 p.m. according to downdetector.com

Two cuts in high-capacity telecom lines that carry data traffic led to chaos on Friday afternoon for many Americans as Comcast Corp., Verizon Communications, and Spectrum services crashed in the eastern United States.

People were left with partial or no television, internet, and voice services, according to philly.com.

Comcast said it was switching network providers to restore service and had some success after several hours on late Friday afternoon. But the outage was so bad that even Comcast office phones were down. One cut was of a transmission line between New York and Chicago and the other cut was in the southern United States, according to social media postings and the company.

In a statement, Comcast called the cuts separate and unrelated and apologized to its customers.

The breadth of the outages were reported by customers on the website downdetector.com. Social media postings complaining about the outage were most prevalent among Comcast customers.

Streaming giant Netflix also experienced difficulties.

Many Xfinity customers say that Comcast’s customer service phone lines crashed.