Glitch on Comcast's Network Leads to Google Access Issues

By Patrick Barnard

TMCnet Associate Editor

 

A glitch on Comcast’s network reportedly caused some temporary “Google (News - Alert) outages” in various parts of the Northeast yesterday.



According to published reports, the outage affected many Google users in the Boston area, who found that access was either painfully slow or they couldn’t access the site at all. It remains unclear how widespread the outage was.

Google has since worked with Comcast (News - Alert) to correct the problem, which reportedly resulted from the failure of a DNS server on Comcast’s network. In a statement, Google said its engineers “helped troubleshoot the problem and provided diagnostic information” to Comcast to keep the problem from recurring.


In a widely-published statement, Comcast said “there was a hardware problem with one of our servers in Massachusetts today, which prevented a small number of customers in the area from connecting to some Web sites for a brief period of time. This was an isolated and random issue which we quickly resolved as soon as we became aware of it.”

“Comcast apologizes for any inconvenience this problem may have caused. Our goal is to provide a superior Internet experience for our customers, which includes being able to access all of the Web sites of their choice.”

Such incidents are not without precedent. In June, a software glitch delayed AOL’s e-mail for millions of users – and in August, the video sharing site YouTube.com became inaccessible due to high traffic volume.

Such incidents also shore up the point that we all rely on network equipment - which is often hidden far out of our view - more than ever before …

Other reports:

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Patrick Barnard is Associate Editor for TMCnet and a columnist covering the telecom industry. To see more of his articles, please visit Patrick Barnard’s columnist page.