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Ask HN: Is Comcast having internet problems?

129 points by collinmanderson ↗ HN
I believe others are having problems too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15637299

Update: The issue seems to be around 50% packet loss.

I called Business Support and the person was unaware of the issue, so please also call in to report the issue so Comcast starts to realize how much of a problem this is.

I had the support person ping facebook.com from my modem which showed packet loss. I asked them to send me to the next tier of support which they did. (This ends up being a ticket where someone will call me back.)

The issue started for me around 12:50pm Eastern time.

Update 2:10pm eastern: There's another thread on the homepage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15637607 (update: 2:26pm the other thread was removed from the home page)

Update: I contacted Comcast Network Operations Center. They confirmed they're aware of the issue and working on fixing it, but didn't provide any more details.

Update 2:30pm eastern: The issue appears to be resolved.

61 comments

[ 1.3 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] thread
angrydev
Comcast user in SE Michigan here, can't reach certain websites (reddit, cnn, basecamp)
ghshephard
Comcast Business user in Ann Arbor, MI - some sites are fast (Ycombinator) but a lot of others (Atlassian) are dog slow. A 40 Megabyte download from https://dbeaver.jkiss.org/download/ that normally takes 30 seconds is on target for 2 hours.
cls59
Same in San Jose.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
uncled1023
I'm in Northern California and also having issues.

One thing I noticed is that it is only Downloads having issues. My uploads are as fast as ever.

I then connected to my VPN, and everything is working great. I think it is their routing/DNS that is having the issues, not the connection itself.

justinlink
Lot of packet loss. Pennsylvania Comcast Business Class.

Twitter has a lot of people complaining all over the country when searching the tag comcast.

oregontechninja
Same in Albany, OR. Any theories or answers as to why we're seeing such a performance loss?
Todd
Comcast Business is bad near Seattle
aacook
Same issues in Plymouth, MA. Noticed it first w/ Stripe but now other sites like Reddit too.
kevin2r
South Florida as well, can't reach some websites.
dfcab
Same here, been crawling since around 1pm EST
stormcode
Boston, Comcast Biz. Same issues.
brianwawok
South Bend, IN is no bueno here.. both from comcast business and comcast residential
Pieman103021
I currently can't reach doodle, something is definitely up.
dhess
Yes. Comcast Business, SF.
funwithjustin
Oakland checking in. Can't reach about half of the internet, dropping a lot of packets.
gregimba
some sites are timing out for me in WA
8000800008
Secaucus, Edison NJ also having issues
aaronmiler
Comcast home customer in Portland OR

Netflix servers responding and streaming fine, but almost everything else is slow

funwithjustin
Serious question - what could cause this? I don't know much about network configuration or DNS. Could it be a coordinated attack on Comcast's infrastructure somewhere? Seems a little crazy that they'd be experiencing problem nation-wide with no redundancy baked into their system.

I tried manually flipping over to Google's DNS servers with the same result.

Shelnutt2
Since we are resolving dns, we know its not a dns issue. This appears to be pack loss / routing issue. The most likely cause of this is someone has leaked internal routes, or leaked bgp.

I don't see anything from bgpmon (https://twitter.com/bgpmon) or bgpstream (https://twitter.com/bgpstream) for North America though. There have been multiple bgp leaks today but nothing that I can see that effects comcast/rnc.

It does appear at least some site I'm seeing are being routed through Europe.

  traceroute kayak.com
  traceroute to kayak.com (185.6.169.69), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
   2  96.120.68.17 (96.120.68.17)  7.840 ms  8.995 ms  8.354 ms
   3  96.108.154.229 (96.108.154.229)  8.136 ms  9.174 ms  8.325 ms
   4  be-23-sur03.westroxbury.ma.boston.comcast.net (69.139.221.226)  9.879 ms  7.478 ms  7.667 ms
   5  be-20-ar01.needham.ma.boston.comcast.net (68.85.106.21)  9.527 ms  12.000 ms  8.524 ms
   6  * * *
   7  ae-1-16.bar1.zurich1.level3.net (4.69.142.129)  118.578 ms  118.947 ms  118.229 ms
   8  ae-1-16.bar1.zurich1.level3.net (4.69.142.129)  127.931 ms  116.424 ms  117.852 ms
   9  nexellent-a.bar1.zurich1.level3.net (213.242.82.110)  118.340 ms  117.555 ms  115.950 ms
funwithjustin
Thanks for the info. How on earth could Comcast have a single point of failure for their entire network nation-wide?

Would this suggest that there's possibly something like a MITM attack going on that's hijacking their traffic somewhere?

tclancy
>Thanks for the info. How on earth could Comcast have a single point of failure for their entire network nation-wide?

I guess I've been a Comcast customer too long given I don't even understand your question. It would seem more shocking if it were not something like this.

quwert95
I'm in the SF Bay Area and after looking at traceroutes and packet loss it looks like something at PAIX has failed between Comcast, Hurricane Electric, NTT, and others.

A coordinated attack could be a cause of something like this, but more often than not it's a hardware or power failure at a critical exchange like PAO, DFW, IAD, etc. Also possible, human error in turning down traffic to certain servers, networks, and IP ranges.

tclancy
Dover, NH Comcast, same here.
donutdan4114
Manchester, NH... Sllooowowww....... Droppin' packets like it's hot.
trebor
Same trouble in Frederick, MD. Packet loss appears to be high too.
caseyohara
Comcast residential customer in Denver, CO. Lots of sites intermittently slow/unreachable right now.
kreisys
Bell Canada business customer in Ottawa. Getting about 50% packet loss to about 50% of the internet.