Recent Comcast Network Outages

Since early December 2018, Barrington 220 has experienced a fair number of brief network outages related to Comcast service interruptions. While each of the outages have been brief in nature, about 5 minutes each in length, they are quite disruptive to our teaching and learning environment in the One to World infrastructure that we carefully crafted. While some of our school buildings have not been impacted, the majority have.

We have been in constant contact with Comcast teams from the very start, pressuring them to find the cause of the outages and then quickly implementing resolutions. At one time, Comcast had a reported 40 staff members working on one of the issues that was causing our outages. The Comcast engineers found and corrected a problem related to the routing of network traffic between two brands of network routers.

Two brief outages took place during the first week of February 2019, one during the school day and one after school hours. These outages were caused by Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on other Comcast customers using the same Comcast network on which our systems run. DDoS attacks are hard to mitigate and increasingly common. 

(As a side note, there is a curious relationship to DDoS attacks and the online gaming that has helped give rise to DDoS attackers that sell their nefarious and illegal services. Security expert and blogger Brian Krebs writes extensively about this.)

While I cannot assure you that we have seen the last of these outages, we continue to work with Comcast and expect that they will soon bring us some good news concerning a full resolution for these ongoing outages.