Thousands of customers appear to be offline and without cable service across Capitol Hill — and perhaps beyond — Thursday morning.
Service provider Comcast hasn’t publicly announced the details of the disruption but the company’s sites are detailing an outage expected to last until 1 PM. However, at least one business customer in the neighborhood said that a customer representative told his company to expect the outage to possibly last through the day.
CHS has heard from people who work from home and businesses served by Comcast reporting no service across the Pike/Pine area and eastern Capitol Hill as well as reports from Seattle above the Montlake Cut. Some business point of sale systems that depend on connectivity are also down around the area.
A Comcast representative tells us the company will provide more details on the situation to CHS soon. UPDATE: The Comcast rep says he can’t yet say when service will be restored but did provide some details on what has happened.
He tells CHS “a fiber optic line located in the Madison Park area” was damaged around 8:45 AM but “the cause of the damage is still unknown.” UPDATE: The issue was instead traced to damage caused by construction work in South Lake Union.
“We have technicians on the scene and are assessing the full extent of the damage as well as the number of customers who are potentially impacted by the outage,” the spokesperson said.
Comcast can’t yet provide an estimate on when service will be restored.
@jseattle Comcast told us out until 5pm. Dude. Seriously? We’re trying to run a business and are sending 34 ppl home.
— Brian Rauschenbach (@rauschenbach) April 9, 2015
UPDATE: As the outage drags on, things have gotten political. Here’s a tweet from earlier today sent by Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant:
Enough w/ @comcast price gouging, monopoly and outages! We need #MuncipalBroadband and compensation 4 lost business. http://t.co/swW9BBFoE8 — Kshama Sawant (@cmkshama) April 9, 2015
Capitol Hill-headquartered The Stranger apparently were able to jury rig enough of a connection for Ansel Herz to weigh in on the Comcast failure:
Too bad there isn’t another option, like, a non-corporate-overlord Internet provider that we could do more than bitch about! Except there could be.Upgrade Seattle, a group advocating for a city-run gigabit Internet network, sent me this statement: “Our condolences on the death of your Internet. This is why we need a strong, accountable municipal Internet service throughout Seattle.” Over to you, Mayor Ed Murray.
(Image: Comcast via Twitter)
(Image: CHS)
Meanwhile, Comcast has posted this picture (on the right) showing some of the repair work reportedly underway — “Splicing fiber in SLU to restore service to Madison Park and surrounding neighborhoods.”
Out and about, we found the CenturyLink technician (left) hooking up a new customer on Capitol Hill. He said he’s been passing out more cards than usual today.
We’re late to remind — and it might seem obvious — but if you’re phone service is provided by Comcast, you also won’t be able to make 911 calls during the outage.
UPDATE 3:50 PM: We’re getting word of service being restored to areas of the Hill including around Volunteer Park.
UPDATE 4:10 PM: The Seattle Times says an estimated 33,000 customers have been affected by the outage.
UPDATE 5:45 PM: Comcast says most customers are back online and the last few thousand should be restored within the hour.
UPDATE 4/10/2015 11 AM: Another call from City Hall about holding Comcast responsible for its service disruption — Mayor Ed Murray posted this to his office blog Friday morning:
If you were one of the more than 33,000 households impacted by today’s Comcast’s widespread cable outage, you have some recourse under the franchise agreement and the City of Seattle’s Cable Customer Bill of Rights.
Make sure that you report your outage by calling 1-800-COMCAST (266-2278).
For this particular outage, the Bill of Rights specifically allows for:
The Cable Customer Bill of Rights established levels and quality of service to ensure customer satisfaction. Specifically when it comes to courtesy, accessibility, responsiveness, services for customers with disabilities, customer information, customer privacy, safety, satisfaction guarantees, complaint procedures and credits to customers, the City of Seattle can advocate on your behalf.
For more information on the Cable Customer Bill of Rights, visit http://www.seattle.gov/cable/2001_Bill_of_Rights.htm.
Is it just a Comcast issue? It’s also out at Statbucks on E Olive, which claims to use Google internet.
If Google is just buying Comcast internet and putting their name on it, or leasing access from Comcast to their own network switches, it would be impacted the same way.
I know that’s the case here. Google name. Comcast under the lid.
How long into an internet outage does one wait before you start burning books and furniture to keep warm?
Watch for bonfires and looting.
i just stocked up on canned goods and bottled water. no telling how long we’ll have to live like this.
Fallout 4 still loads for me, so I at least have some time before we need to switch into “it’s the end of the world, grab our go bag and head for the mountains” mode.
It is down through the Eastlake neighborhood. I assume Wave and Google internet would be down too. They all use the same fiber optics I think…
Not exactly, no. Some of them are leasing access from the same provider(s), but their networks aren’t all the same, no.
I have CenturyLink fiber in the Central District, and we’ve had no outages (not even since the initial installation)
A bunch of Seattle’s connectivity to the east goes under Lake Washington and comes in through Madison Park, at 42nd and either Highland or Lee. Here’s a video from the 80s about the cable landing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XbhwJKttwI
And here’s what it looks like today: https://www.flickr.com/photos/chronomex/5462594145
Think it has anything to do with the former NSA director coming to town tonight?
Great video and picture… thanks for posting!
Does anyone know how much of madison park this is affecting too?
Besides Capitol Hill it’s out in at least some parts of Madison Pk, Madrona, and Leschi, Central District too.
Down at Eastlake (near SLU) too. Fuck Comcast. Going to have to tether for a while.
Anyone with a well followed Twitter account should recommend businesses use a mobile Hotspot via a smart phone to get wifi for credit card transactions. That should at least work for iPad based pos systems.
It appears many have thought of that. I can barely get Edge network on my tmobile phone downtown where i usually get very fast LTE due to the network being overloaded. Frustrating.
My Comcast Account now says 9pm…
same here. so frustrating. If anyone is needing internet access today, it seems the SU area has access. I am at a coffee shop on 12th, bout a half mile from pike.
Business account also down at Pine and Bellevue. Rep said ETA for fix is 16:30. Closed up shop for the day.
Im on 14th avenue and republican- Comcast says they expect repair to be completed by 9pm
Got a response from @ComcastWA 9 minutes ago
“Not big fan of etas because they create expectation for which I apologize. Splicing brings different areas up at diff times~wn”
This certainly sucks but at least the sun is shining. If I could I would go outside and work on an early year tan. Now if only I could get Comcast to reimburse us all for the lost productivity.
It also shows the fragility of our infrastructure. Look at the DC power outage on Tuesday. We, as a country, need to invest in our infrastructure big time or we’ll soon be a third world country with wobbly power, snail-mail internet speeds (as if we don’t now), and busses that use stone wheels. Ok, so I’m being melodrmatic.
Is it working in downtown Seattle? I’m in Capitol Hill, and no one in the vicinity can get online. I work remotely so this has left me useless today.
Anywhere with Internet from someone else (Wave Broadband or Centurylink) probably works. The libraries are on City of Seattle network, so they work.
Right? Another news site’s article posted a Tweet from someone telling everyone to stop complaining about the outage and take the day off like her. What a nice idea… unless unless you rely on Internet acess for work and other people are relying on you to meet hard deadlines.
Yes, exactly! I have deadlines to meet and this is a huge impact. I’d love to meander the parks and enjoy the sun, but instead I’m stressed out and trying to at least respond to emails from my phone.
Unfortunately I can’t work from the libraries because the security certificates don’t meet my company’s requirements.
How about Ballard, West Seattle, or U District? I need to get online for some things after work today, I’ll probably have to go to a coffeeshop in another neighbourhood, I suppose.
West Seattle is online. Seems to be Capitol Hill and north mostly.
Why internet needs to become a utility, not run by for profit Corp
Yeah, right. You think that would prevent somebody from accidentally slicing through a fiber cable?
“Wait, don’t backhoe that– it belongs to the City!”
yes, because public utilities never experience outages – like when the power goes out for hours. sometimes, shit happens. no matter who the company is.
If it were a publicly owned utility then we’d have elected officials being held accountable. Officials that could be unelected. Comcast has no such relationship to it’s customers, made worse by the fact that they have only one competitor (who seems equally troubled).
1. Comcast answers to the Office of Cable Communications
http://www.seattle.gov/cable/
2. They have more than one competitor. In most areas you can also choose at least CenturyLink, for starters. In some areas you can choose Wave AND CenturyLink. (There is “overlay competition” in some neighborhoods). Some buildings have even more options. The point is, it’s more than 1 competitor.
3. You’ll get an automatic credit for the outage. No, you can’t sue for loss of business, nobody pays that. It’s in the terms of service. Good luck trying.
4. Unfortunately the “Predict the Future” app is still in pre-release.
Quit whining, people– utilities have outages. Shit happens.
They’re supposed to give automatic credit, but in my experience I’ve had to call them to request it. However this is the most widespread outage I’ve seen since living in the city limits so they might do it automatically here.
Don’t count on automatic credit. I did online chat with comcast, got them to confirm credit will post to my account, amount and when, and then saved the chat with confirmation number. Even with that, it’s likely the credit won’t apply and I’ll have to follow up. I do not believe they will by default apply credit to anyone ever. But I will guarantee they will try to upsell you on other services in the course of the chat. Good luck trying to sell me cable. I don’t own a TV.
believe me barely any people know about the credit and they will never issue an autocred.
You have to call them up and get it put in, and even then there is a huge chance it just wont be honored.
The cable comm office is a joke too, like the whole state of the internet in this place.
wow, the histrionics over an accidentally cut cable, that could happen to any provider i might add, is just hilarious.
Even if this cut cable situation could have happened to any service provider, I think people’s elevated frustration speaks to the poor service Comcast is offering generally. For example, there was no cut cable last night when my Comcast service randomly went out for 25 minutes. Or all last fall when it was insanely slow every night for no reason (and, no there were no hardware problems within our apartment).
Basically, Comcast sucks. And it sucks that they have such market power here. It’s not outrageous that people are frustrated.
What’s outrageous is that people have this deluded notion that any other provider(s) would necessarily be any better. I have a friend who lives just down the road from me and he’s on Wave Broadband. He says they’re way worse than Comcast. Depending on who else you ask, they’re way better. Basically every cable-based provider is at the mercy of any nitwit with a backhoe or post-hole digger at any time. It could just as easily have been somebody slicing CenturyLink’s or the City of Seattle’s fiber and the same thing would’ve happened.
Seriously. I’ve had Comcast since back when it was TCI. I’ve never ever ever had poor customer service from them on the phone or in person. They rarely have service interruptions. For a brief time when I lived on First Hill and had to use Millennium (Now WAVE I think) it was a nightmare! Constant outages.
But seriously, it’s just the internet. We survived for thousands of years without it. We will survive one day. Get over it and go to the park. Nobody ever died from not having internet. Ever.
“Nobody ever died from it” is not a reason to overlook a problem. Might mean we don’t prioritize Internet access issues over human rights or world hunger or something, but doesn’t mean criticizing Comcast’s service is, like, preposterous.
And yeah, people have come to rely on Internet access. Maybe they didn’t always but they do now. And not just to stream HBO or play video games… to run businesses and do jobs. As you can read in others’ comments, it is a day ruiner for business owners and workers and students when Internet suddenly goes out (though, understandably, this time an accident occurred and that’s not Comcast’s fault).
It’s awesome that you’ve never had a problem with your Comcast service but that has not been the case for me. And it has not been the case for others – the Internet (when it works) is replete with stories of folks across Seattle having repeated problems with Comcast’s service.
Don’t mean to start an Internet fight but I do think there should be more viable options and competition for ISPs in Seattle or that the City should consider the Internet-as-public-utility route. Just one person’s opinion.
thank you.
so much empty-headed noise. So few with a clue.
I also think Comcast is pretty good. My service hardly ever goes down. Certainly no worse than anywhere else I’ve lived, and a helluva lot BETTER than most places. The only complaint I have about them is the cost, but time (and resulting more competition) will fix that.
“resulting more competition” will not happen automatically. They fight that every step of the way. As for cable broadband, I have only Comcast as option based on my address. And the prices just keep going up.
Given the number of people working from home or small businesses in the Seattle area affected by this outage, this probably pretty easily adds up to millions of dollars of lost productivity and sales.Just because you don’t care if you can’t play Candy Crush doesn’t mean that opinion is shared by the rest of the city.
So, I just figured out how to use my phone as a modem. If you have a smartphone, you can likely do the same by setting up the mobile hotspot and connecting from there. I can finally get back to work….
I learned that my T-Mobile tethering service has a data usage limit, only because I hit it this morning 3 hours into the outage.
BTW, my IoT devices are starting to come back online, so the internet service around 10th and aloha seems to be restored.
The “my account” page on comcast.com was giving a 9PM ETA this morning. Now when I go they still say 9PM and then try upselling me on better TV service (which I’m guessing means “not with Comcast,” amirite?)
Annoying but not the end of the world. Hopefully I can find my mobile access point and get a trickle of connectivity from home.
Service has been restored near Pike/Boren.
Excellent! Now that Sawant is in on the game and grandstanding, I’m sure the repair technicians (who have been splicing all day as fast as their little hands could manage) are working EVEN FASTER, because, you know– Sawant is ON THE CASE! Awesome!
/end sarcasm
#givemeafuckin’break
Grandstanding? By expressing her political opinion. Is there way she could make any statement in any way that you would not call grandstanding? She’s an elected leader. She has a voice. She uses it. That’s what’s happening here.
She’ll add Comcast after she converts Boeing to manufacturing buses and whatever other public transit she was saying they should be making. (read as grandstanding)
A construction accident ripping a fiber is not a political event. It’s still a construction accident. If Comcast sat on their ass and did nothing to fix it, she might have something to rant about. They didn’t. All of Sawant’s bloviating did nothing at all to restore service any faster. The repair crews didn’t splice any faster because of her pathetic attempts to score points by vilifying a popular “enemy” that everyone loves to hate. And while she’s ranting about “compensation for lost business” (which I’m quite sure she knows fully well is specifically disclaimed in the Terms of Service anyway), why isn’t she (or anyone else) asking WHICH CONSTRUCTION CREW supposedly cut the fiber? Simple answer: it’s so much easier and more fun to take cheap shots and score points demonizing The Big Bad Cable Company that everyone loves to hate. If she wants to do something really productive besides blowing of a bunch of pandering hot air, why doesn’t she come up with a plan to identify a funding source and restart those plans the City shelved to partner with that company to offer Gigabit Internet service? Screaming for a city-owned internet service is the easy part. Finding a way to fund the capital construction costs is the hard part. Where’s those great ideas?
You talk about the construction company hitting the line. There is a lot to consider. Did the construction company have a valid One Call locate. Was the line located in the time frame alloted by law. Was the line located correctly. Then did the construction company did safely to not hit the line.
Sawant does seem to be developing a pattern of hijacking and grandstanding on issues which people are upset about. She did that recently with the LGBT hate-crime issue, and now she’s done it with the Comcast outage.
People were mumbling, but officials were only giving it passing notice. Sawant brought to a high-profile town hall, and forced city hall to take real steps. Similar here. Murray has given lip service to a muni broadband, but it’s gotten nowhere. Let’s see where she can take it from here.
I am not aware that the City has taken any “real steps” (on the hate crime issue) under pressure from Sawant. Please explain.
The shuttle and the youth shelter are moving forward. Those are what come to my mind.
I think someone needs to explain that Comcast is not in any way a monopoly. On the hill most people have a choice of at least 3 broadband options. CenturyLink, Clear and Comcast. Ms. Sawant is an idiot. Can’t wait to vote her out of office.
The last time I checked, CenturyLink could only offer ‘up to’ 6Mbps to my location, but probably would only be able to do more like 1.5Mbps. That’s not really a choice.
Clear has been bought out by Sprint, and their service was never even remotely good before, nor would I expect it to be any better now, at least judging by both of my FreedomPop access points (the first of which was reselling Clear service, and the second of which was reselling Sprint). So that’s not really a choice either.
I still have Clearwire. I didn’t know about the outage until I read about it here.
In the last book she read Comcast must be listed as one of those evil monopolies afflicting the oppressed.
Yeah, fucking book readers ruin everything.
Just because Comcast provides the best service doesn’t make it a monopoly. Everyone has the choice of at minimum three services.
My building only allows Comcast, there are no other options available. I pay $120 for basic Internet and a incoming-only phone line. They can charge me whatever they want and I have to pay because I need it for my job – btw I lost a full day’s pay due to this damn outage, it’s like I’m paying them $220 this month. One day’s worth of free Internet doesn’t even begin to cover that.
Unfortunately a lot of multi-unit buildings, both apartments and condominiums, do this. Usually the utility pays a spiff to an apartment management to give them the exclusive. Or when new condo buildings are built, the provider can go to the developer and in exchange for a payoff and typically wiring the bldg free, they get an exclusive (commonly 5 yrs) to be the sole provider in the bldg. Your developer sold you down the river for their own gain. When you buy a condo unit it’s one of the documents you sign, that you realize you have no choice of providers until the exclusivity agreement expires. At that time, the condo’s residents (by way of the condo association) are free to negotiate with any provider you want. The upside is that sometimes it gives you more options. Companies such as Condo Internet (who serve a lot of bldgs on C.H.) can provide better/faster/cheaper internet service than might be available to single-family homes. Part of the blame for that setup lies with your bldg management or condo association.
Back up on 12th & Denny since 4pm.
There seem to be shills from Comcast here. Look, it”s not unreasonable for Seattle customers to have expected Comcast to have built out their fiber to survive a single cut. They even could do it in a way that the service slows with a cut, which would require less extra fiber build-out, until the cut is repaired. Going down completely because of a fiber cut isn’t great, and people are right to complain.
Comcast had 41% margins on their cable business last quarter and $2B in net profit, which they’re using to boost dividends and share buybacks rather than investing in their network. They could have invested some of their profits to add redundancy that might prevent outages from single points of failure like these. They didn’t. In fact, Comcast can charge these amounts, get these profit margins, and provide this low level of service quality because people have few other options. It’s perfectly reasonable for people to be upset and want more options and competition for broadband in Seattle.
They can get centurylink or clear. I have plenty of friends who use those options successfully. 3 providers plus means no monopoly.
No. CenturyLink has a max of 7Mbs in most areas (not considered broadband) and 4G based networks (using the cell network) are extremely expensive for more than a small amount of data. Not the same, apples to oranges. In most areas of Seattle, there’s only one option for broadband, and that’s Comcast. We need more.
geekboy is right. and “iluvcaphill” is a shill.
Given i’m writing this on Centurylink gigabit fiber in the Central District, I don’t think your broad over-generalizations actually reflect the situation. I can’t be the only one who has working Internet here.
I’ve had Comcast for as long as I can remember and their service (customer service being the exception) has been pretty rock solid. When was the last time something like this happened? Anyone remember? This wasn’t even their fault!
For people complaining about random outages, those often reside within their buildings or units. There are many internal points of potential failure between the buildings supply line and equipment in use – modem/router.
Comcast can currently give us more bang for our buck, for that they should be shamed.
The bright side of this is that when 33k people go offline, I’m sure the city will demand that measures be taken to make things more reliable.
Why are you sure the city will be able to effect change to make Comcast more reliable? Do you understand how powerful Comcast actually is? Comcast needs to establish redundancies in their infrastructure so large scale outages like this are less likely to happen and if they do happen can be resolved more quickly. And if there were municipal broadband, access could be granted on an emergency basis to large numbers of people should commercial outages occur. What would you be saying if Comcast owned the electrical grid? vs. Seattle City Light?
Yes, Comcast is quite powerful. But when you take 911 service away from thousands of people city leaders tend to puff their chests and demand change. I never said the change would happen but it adds to Comcasts PR nightmare.
Nearly 8pm, and still no internet in Mad Valley.
My impression of Comcast stems from an offer I got to work on their help desk. The pay was $14 an hour, well below the market rate. When I tried to negotiate for a higher rate, they told me this was just the base pay, and I could earn more with sales commissions. The main goal of their support staff is to sell upgrades. This strikes me as unscrupulous. I’ve heard many horror stories, and this seems to sum it up.
I love you, Cap Hill Blog – this is the only place I could find out what was happening – I had a friend google you and then read me what was going on – I depend on you for news of clouds, arrests and Cal Anderson, and outages.
Made my day! Thanks!
Contacted Comcast to get a credit for the outage (I had reported it early on Yesterday). Not really worth my time.
It seems to me that they would get some good will from their customers (for a change), it they automatically credit us. Then bill the construction company to get it back.
Even in chat, it took 10 minutes to get credit, which was mainly the rep restating obvious things and trying to upsell me on xfinity packages (obnoxious), but I got $5 out of it (or rather was refunced $5). I do wish there were automatic outage penalties/credits. Like if a company has a deal with an ISP, there are downtime contracts and depending on the business, it could mean even 1 hour of downtime results in a huge percent off that month’s bill because the service is essential to the business. With those financial penalties awaiting, perhaps Comcast would build more redundancies in their system so if a line is cut it doesn’t blank out such a huge number of people.
It may be a pain but if we all demand credit, that will help in the long run.
We apparently need our Internets more than power, water, and other utilities, because they have similar single points of failure and yet don’t get create nearly as much angst when service is disrupted.
If you depend on the internet for your business, you need to learn about redundancies. You backup your data, right? (Haha, sorry.) Anyway, get multiple internet providers and link the connections, for example.
By what measure do you say failures of power, water and other utilities don’t create “nearly as much angst when service is disrupted”? Perhaps power failures would create a great deal of angst and potential dangers. A place like a nursing home or hospital may have a generator to deal with that as lights can’t exactly go out during an operation for example. But for a business or individual internet customer, getting multiple internet service providers may not be affordable or even technically doable. Do you suggest having Comcast broadband internet and a DSL hookup at the same time, paying hundreds more a year when internet is already outrageously priced? I’m glad you’re content with the current setup. You too will reap the benefits of municipal broadband options though, unless you want to officially say right now, you’ll never sign up for it, even if it’s cheaper, faster and more reliable than Comcast.
“Do you suggest having Comcast broadband internet and a DSL hookup at the same time, paying hundreds more a year when internet is already outrageously priced? ”
Yes, that is exactly what I’m suggesting, assuming the internet is that critical to your business.
It’s interesting that this is a breaking point for people, this specific minimal cost. When wages are increased by 40%, we expect them to adapt; when they worry about losing some percentage of business when parking is made difficult or removed, we expect them to adapt. But an extra thousand bucks a year for Internet, no way man.
“I’m glad you’re content with the current setup.”
Who’s content? I wouldn’t choose to do business with Comcast, but have no other real option. I’d love to have a municipal option, or faster DSL or fiber options, but they aren’t available to my address. On the other hand, I’ve had exactly one outage like this with Comcast in 8 years, so I’m not sure you could improve that reliability.
However, I’m not going to throw a hissy fit when an accident happens, because accidents happen. Avoiding this kind of thing from happening altogether isn’t really cost effective for private, non-critical uses. For businesses, however, redundancy is key.
You can request a credit through their online chat. It is pretty painless. They started at $5, but I told them I needed $20, which they agreed too.
This has been going on since yesterday. Here in Detroit as of yesterday, the first estimate to repair was 7:47A, then 8A, then 8P. then 8A the next day, now it says 8P today. I have a Remote Work day today, luckily I can tether to my Verizon Hotspot. Friends in Philadephia, Denver, and Chicago are reporting a complete outage as well.