As of this evening, it looks like Comcast is having problems with a few of their DNS servers. The servers in Chicago and Detroit are offline, rendering the Internet nigh-unusable for many of their customers in parts of the midwest. I haven’t seen any official announcement, other than the red lights on the DNS status page, but I’ve heard a lot of complaints from people using their mobile phones to connect to the Internet. If you’re one of the affected customers, you can change your DNS settings to use any combination of the following servers:
- OpenDNS: 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220
- Google: 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4
- Level3: 4.2.2.1 and 4.2.2.2
It’s interesting to me how different this is than it would have been a few years ago. With the popularity of smart phones, many people have access that doesn’t rely on their ISP. I’ve already provided support to several people on Twitter who are once again able to waste a Sunday evening surfing the web. I wonder how much of a credit I’ll get on my bill.
Update, 10:29 PM: Engadget has a brief article up now. Comcast has been providing updates via Twitter, but there’s currently no ETA for repair.
Update, 6:48 AM: Based on Twitter timestamps, it looks like Comcast engineers got things fixed around 2AM EST. All of their servers are reporting OK. I haven’t seen any explanation of what happened, but that will probably come later today.
