Comcast recovers from the shutdown of video, broadband services in parts of the United States

Comcast, the country's largest broadband service provider and one of the largest pay-TV providers, experienced a breakdown of some services on Friday.

The Philadelphia-based company said Friday afternoon phone customers across the United States have been affected.

The apparent cause? "We have identified two separate fiber cuts that are unrelated to our core network providers," Comcast said in a statement to USA TODAY just before 5 pm (ET). We worked immediately to solve the problem and services are now restored to business customers, residential Internet, video and voice. We apologize again for anyone affected. "

Comcast had first stated that only one" fiber cutter "affected his customers, as well as other suppliers.

Customers in Philadelpha, Baltimore, and elsewhere on the East Coast reported Internet and video service failures on Twitter and the Downdetector.com Internet monitoring site, where trouble reports began to arrive just after 12:30 pm ET

Other reports of Comcast customer outages were from Seattle, San Francisco and Atlanta, according to Downdetector.com CNBC, a network of NBC Universal owned by Comcast, reported broke down for the first time.

Comcast is one of the largest pay-TV providers in the country with over 22 million subscribers, and the most Large broadband provider with over 26 million subscribers, according to Leichtman Research Group. The company also provides broadband and video to more than 2 million businesses.

The San Francisco-based network monitoring and surveillance firm, ThousandEyes, began to see network problems starting at 12:15 pm AND. Around 16:30 ET, network problems seemed to be solved, said the firm.

Many Internet users beyond Comcast's own 25 million subscriber base were affected, too, according to ThousandEyes. This is because the traffic of others crosses the provider network because it serves as part of the backbone linking the different regions of the country. "This is a very good illustration of the interconnection of many of these networks," said Angelique Medina, product marketing manager at ThousandEyes.

"It's a bit like a domino effect: any provider can potentially have a big impact on a number of users," she said. "In this case, because it was Comcast, the blast radius was just huge."

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