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Comcast investigates cause of Monday morning outages

Posted at 1:50 PM, Feb 15, 2016
and last updated 2016-02-15 13:50:49-05

NEW YORK — Comcast service outages sent social media ablaze with complaints from areas all across the country. The TV and Internet provider’s customer service account, @comcastcares, was responding to an onslaught of unhappy customers on Monday.

“[G]et more employees and offer same day help when there’s a problem. It’s 2016, we aren’t sending snail mail for help,” one Twitter user wrote.

A map of reported service interruptions from Downdetector, which aggregates outage complaints on social media, showed problems occurred in regions over the country.

Comcast outage map

A Comcast spokesperson told CNNMoney in an email, “It looks like it was a number of markets, but not all customers/not all services were impacted. I can let you know as we get updates.” It did not say how many customers were affected.

A slew of Twitter and Facebook users said the service hotline wasn’t allowing customers to get in touch with a representative.

Most of the complaints said that none of Comcast’s high-definition, or HD, TV channels were accessible. Others reported that their home phones lines were beeping and others couldn’t access the Internet or their Xfinity, or Internet-based television, accounts.

Comcast said in a statement that the company is “continuing to investigate what appears to be a temporary network interruption that impacted some of our services this morning. Our engineers have been working on this and services are starting to be restored. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused our customers.”

One customer service representative said on Twitter that transmission issues were to blame and the company was “working on redirecting our feeds” and “most areas are back up” as of 12:15 pm ET.

Complaints peaked between 9 am and 12 pm ET on Monday, reaching as many as 17,000 outage reports.

Comcast has more than 27 million customers, and 89,000 of those are new cable subscribers the company signed on last quarter. That was its best performance in eight years.