Xfinity outage affects local businesses
ST. JOSEPH COUNTY, Ind. -- Comcast Xfinity users experienced internet and phone service outages late last night into this morning all across the United States, and right here in Michiana, its effects could be felt.
School City of Mishawaka reported that they were unable to receive phone calls during the outage, which had a wide impact on local businesses using the service-- either for communications or storing necessary data and documents online.
“We’ve become so reliant on the internet, that it really has a negative impact on business when it goes down," said Jeff Rea, President of the South Bend Regional Chamber. "It’s that inherent issue where the pandemic has really taught us to be very technology oriented—Zoom, we’re all living on Zoom or Teams or some of those kind of things—and so when the internet is not working we can’t do those things.”
“The internet outage this morning made for a very busy morning,” said Boyd Smith, founder of TechKnowledgy Inc, which provides I-T services for manufacturing and other large companies-- several of which were affected by the outage.
According to Smith “Many of our customers used Comcast and we fielded a lot of service calls this morning, because customers were wondering when they were going to be back online and reattached to their stuff.”
Fortunately the outage was resolved around 11:30am, but disruptive outages like this can affect businesses at any time.
“An internet connection can eventually fail," said Smith. "Power will occasionally go out, so every business should have a plan B.”
He suggests all businesses have a Plan B in place-- such as a backup internet network, and having all necessary date stored locally, and a way to communicate with employees to prevent an outage from disrupting daily activities.
“Our customers that had the plan B for the internet and a communications plan in place—it was a bad morning, but they just went about their day," said Smith. "They went on to other stuff and they didn’t have to panic like some other people that didn’t have plan Bs in place.”