Comcast network problems August 12 (resolved)

Our monitoring systems are showing that some people who reach our servers via an “Internet backbone” company called Global Crossing, including some Comcast cable customers, have been intermittently unable to connect over the last hour or so.

This isn’t an outage on our end; these visitors are also unable to reach other sites that Comcast routes through Global Crossing (and not related to us), such as www.globalcrossing.com. It’s something Comcast and Global Crossing need to address.

We’ll continue to monitor this issue closely and post an update when we’re confident that it’s been resolved.

By the way, if you ever find that you’re unable to connect to our servers (or anyone else’s), a very useful site is CheckSite.us. It shows you whether the destination servers are down, or whether the problem is just a local routing problem that isn’t affecting most other people.

Update 9 AM PDT August 13: According to our monitoring systems, Comcast resolved this shortly after our post, and the problem has not recurred in the ten hours since then.