Comcast Hit With Second Major Internet OutageComcast Hit With Second Major Internet Outage

Cable and Internet service provider Comcast suffered its second major outage in a week, as millions of customers in the Midwest were knocked off line Sunday.

The disruption, which affected the company's high-speed Internet service, affected customers in Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan. The outage began about 7 p.m. and wasn't resolved for most users until about Midnight or later.

Comcast officials acknowledged the trouble on the company's Twitter page, where they posted updates about the problem and indicated the outage was due to a faulty Domain Name Server. The posts indicated that the disruption lingered into Monday for some customers.

"Anyone still not being able to connect due to the DNS issue last night please power cycle all equipment now in proper order," wrote customer service official William Gerth on Monday, on the "Comcast Cares" Twitter feed.

On Sunday, Gerth's harried posts hinted at a widespread outage. "I do not have an ETA for this outage to be fixed. I am on the bridge and will provide updates as I get them," Gerth wrote.

It's the second time in eight days Comcast customers have had to go without Internet service for an extended period. Server problems also knocked out service to millions of Comcast customers along the Eastern Seaboard on Nov. 29.

That glitch hit users in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland, Virginia, New York, New Hampshire, and Washington, D.C. Comcast said the problem was confined to the company's high-speed Internet service, and did not impact its digital TV and telephone offerings.

Some Comcast customers reported they were able to work around the problems by switching to an alternate DNS, such as OpenDNS, in order to circumvent Comcast's apparently ongoing DNS issues.