An electrical fire yesterday morning at a Comcast (NASDAQ: CMCSA) headend plant in Fresno, Calif., took down Internet, TV and telephone service across the central part the state.
"It was the control panel that caught on fire," said Comcast spokesman Bryan Byrd to the Fresno Bee. "The building was not on fire." Byrd did not say how many customers were impacted by the outage, which also affected the nearby towns of Visalia, Modesto, Reedley, Hanford, Fowler, Clovis, Sanger, Selma, Tulare, Lemoore, Dinuba, Riverdale, Los Banos, Atwater and Merced.
Customers in Sacramento and the Bay area also reported problems with telephone service.
According to the Bee, service was fully restored by 3:45 p.m. yesterday.
The outage comes about five months after a DNS issue caused widespread disruption on the West Coast of Comcast Internet and VOD service.
Comcast ended up issuing $5 refunds to customers affected by that outage.
Further south, in Santa Barbara County, another Comcast headend problem caused an outage in September. Customers in California's Santa Ynez Valley, Orcutt and Santa Maria complained about the lack of Internet and phone service.
"This is due to a piece of equipment failing at the headend," Byrd said at the time. "The cause is unknown at this time, but technicians are engaged and working diligently to repair or replace the equipment."
For more:
- read this Fresno Bee story
Related articles:
TWC explains outage as DirecTV quietly experiences its own technical issues
TWC service outage hits 12M subs, even as FCC slaps on $1.1M fine for past outages
Charter ISP customers cope with major weekend service disruptions