Tag: Internet outage spotters

Where’s Google?

I turned on my computer this morning, fired up my browser and waited for my customized Google homepage to load. Nothing!

I entered www.google.com from the address line. Same story.

Two little applets, to calculate my AdSense revenue ($0.34 so far today) and check my Gmail inbox were both DOA.

What’s going on?

I normally use Firefox as my browser. I figured I’d see if Internet Explorer was suffering the same fate. It was not.

“Oh crap,” I thought to myself. “What has gone wrong with my machine?”

Luckily, the answer is nothing. It’s not my problem… well, of course it’s my problem. It’s just not my fault.

I found this on Bostonist.com:

We’ve gotten a number of field reports from users of Comcast’s cable Internet service across the state who are unable to connect to Gmail, Google, and Blogspot. One of our “Internet outage spotters” chronicled a tech support conversation he had in which the Comcast operator told him it was a Firefox issue and he’d have to switch to IE. Apparently Comcast won’t support Firefox as a browser.

Before leaving home I temporarily solved the problem by clearing my cookies, the tiny tracker files left by nearly every website. That’s not a good solution, because now I have to re-sign on to every site I visit.

Is this what they mean by Comcastic?