Comcast suffers major DNS outage; affected areas include Puget Sound and Bay Area

A large num­ber of cus­tomers of telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions giant Com­cast are report­ing tonight that they can­not con­nect to the Inter­net, report­ed­ly because of a wide­spread DNS (domain name sys­tem) serv­er outage.

Affect­ed areas include Puget Sound and the Bay Area.

The Domain Name Sys­tem, for read­ers who don’t know, is like the Inter­net’s phone book. It is a cru­cial part of the Inter­net’s appli­ca­tion lay­er. DNS servers per­form lookups — they route requests for domain names like nwprogressive.org to the com­put­ers where web­sites like NPI’s are served from.

When a DNS serv­er goes down, requests to resolve domain names time out and fail, result­ing in con­nec­tiv­i­ty prob­lems. A DNS out­age can be resolved by switch­ing to a dif­fer­ent pub­lic DNS serv­er or pair of DNS servers offered by a com­pa­ny like OpenDNS or an alter­na­tive Inter­net ser­vice provider. But this requires some degree of tech­ni­cal exper­tise, which a lot of peo­ple sim­ply don’t have.

Com­cast says it’s aware of the prob­lem and work­ing to fix it, but in the mean­time, cus­tomers who aren’t tech­no­log­i­cal­ly savvy enough to fig­ure out how to ditch Com­cast’s DNS servers are out of luck.

Video tuto­ri­als for chang­ing DNS servers are avail­able on YouTube. Here’s one for Mac OS X, and here’s one for Win­dows. If you run a GNU/Linux dis­tri­b­u­tion, you’re prob­a­bly savvy enough to know how to change DNS servers.

What should you change your DNS servers to, if you want to ditch Com­cast’s DNS? One option is OpenDNS, which is known for its rock sol­id reliability.

Input these num­bers to switch to OpenDNS:

• 208.67.222.222
• 208.67.220.220

For faster per­for­mance, a bet­ter option might be Speakeasy/MegaPath, which scores well in the DNS tests that NPI has run.

• 66.80.130.23
• 66.80.131.5

Still anoth­er option is Level3, which pro­vides Inter­net ser­vice providers with their con­nec­tion to the Inter­net backbone.

• 209.244.0.3
• 209.244.0.4

Any of these options is bet­ter than Comcast.