Comcast says Xfinity customers in Philadelphia and South Jersey should see service restored soon

After a chaotic morning caused by widespread Xfinity outages, Comcast customers across Philadelphia and New Jersey began to see their internet and phone service restored later Tuesday morning and afternoon.

In a statement, a Comcast spokesperson said the outages experienced across the city and elsewhere were caused by an unspecified “network issue.”

“We have addressed the issue and service is now restoring for impacted customers, as we continue to investigate the root cause,” a Comcast spokesperson said in a statement just before noon Tuesday. “We apologize to those who were affected.”

The website Downdetector showed a spike in complaints about Xfinity outages Tuesday around 8 a.m. Xfinity’s own outage tracker was down for many customers, who were greeted with the error message “We are experiencing abnormal traffic to our network or … the service or servers on it are not currently available.”

Comcast did not say how many customers were hit by the outage or which areas of the country were most affected. In and around Philadelphia, the Xfinity issues were highly disruptive for workers, many still working remotely due to the lingering impact of the pandemic. Comcast also went hours without addressing the issue publicly, forcing frustrated customers to turn to social media for clues as to when they could expect their service restored.

The outages, which for some persisted through the afternoon, went beyond the Philadelphia region. David Belson, the senior director of data insights at the cloud computing services provider Fastly, wrote on Twitter that his company detected outages in Washington state, Indiana, Georgia, and Illinois on Tuesday after a major outage in and around San Francisco on Monday evening.

The outage in the Bay Area was so widespread that the Marin County sheriff issued a reminder to residents not to call 911 to report their internet issues. A spokesperson for the Philadelphia Police Department said its 911 service wasn’t flooded with calls from angry Comcast customers Tuesday morning.

As of Sept. 30, Comcast’s Xfinity service — which provides TV, internet, and phone service — had more than 34 million residential and business customers nationwide, according to the Wall Street Journal.