Xfinity refuses to speak with me until an outage is resolved...

For an entire week now, we've experienced outages multiple times a day. They range from 30 minutes to several hours in duration and happen without warning. When attempting to contact Comcast to speak to an actual person, their systems refuse to connect me to someone until the outage is resolved. This is by far, the single most absurd action I've ever encountered with Customer Service. As this is severely impacting my ability to work, I need details on how long whatever it is they're doing is going to last. If it's another week+ I need to find other options to literally perform my job, but I can't get through to anyone for details on why this is occurring and how long I can expect it to last.

When did this nonsense of refusing to talk with someone while their service was out begin as I've never had this experience before. It's outrageous that I literally cannot talk to anyone, because THEY took out my service AGAIN