U

Tuesday, April 1st, 2025 11:41 PM

Cause of today's outage in SE Chicago

Mid-morning today the Internet service went down.  The initial text messages and Xfinity app said expected to be restored at 11a, then 1, then 5, then 7pm.  All the while the outage map showed over 2000 people affected from South Chicago to West Chatham.  The cause was listed as "network damage."  What kind of damage (equipment failure, purposeful damage, accidental utility problems, etc.) and is it likely to be down tomorrow?

Official Employee

 • 

2K Messages

1 day ago

 

user_810w9w That is a great question; most of the time, those specifics are not provided by our field team. I can tell you events that I have helped with in the past range from traffic accidents taking out our lines/poles or damaging our nodes to having construction teams from other companies damage our lines during their work and even had vandals cut lines or shoot at them in the past just to name a few outside of abnormal weather events like lightning. Our teams do work as fast as they can to get services restored and try to prevent additional interruptions if possible by completing all the work at once. If there was additional work needed once services were restored, the Xfinity app would have an alert letting you know of upcoming work. 

 

2 Messages

Thanks for the response.  I'm a little surprised there are absolutely no details for such a long outage, but hopefully even a generic reason can be offered in the future.  I've had the service a few months and there have been a couple of outages already.  More than anything I just want to be able to plan.  If the initial restoration estimates were more accurate, different plans would have been made.

Official Employee

 • 

2.7K Messages

The longer interruptions are most times related to a fiber line repair or replacement, user_SECH! Those can be tough to estimate as we work with local utilities to complete those types of jobs. I appreciate you sharing your feedback about how we can improve our interruption notifications and estimates. We are continuing to make that system better and are glad you shared that with us. 

I am an Official Xfinity Employee.
Official Employees are from multiple teams within Xfinity: CARE, Product, Leadership.
We ask that you post publicly so people with similar questions may benefit from the conversation.
Was your question answered? Please, mark a reply as the Accepted Answer.tick
forum icon

New to the Community?

Start Here