Comcast customers around Philadelphia unable to watch Super Bowl due to cable outage
If there was ever a bad time for cable service to go down in the Philly area, during the Super Bowl when the Eagles are playing would be it.
With fans of the Philadelphia Eagles revved up to watch their team take on the Kansas City Chiefs on Super Bowl Sunday, Comcast said it was “working furiously” to restore service to Xfinity customers in some of the city’s neighborhoods, according to the Associated Press.
According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the line was evidently cut deliberately and police were aware of the situation. A Comcast official told the paper that service had been restored for some but not all customers in time for the 6:30 p.m. ET kickoff.
Comcast spokesperson Jen Bilotta told the AP that severed fiberoptic cable in the Kensington section of northeast Philadelphia on Saturday resulted in an outage affecting a few thousand households in the Kensington and Fishtown neighborhoods.
At 7:17 p.m. ET, Xfinity Support tweeted: “All services should now be restored to customers in Kensington and Fishtown that were impacted by an outage caused by vandalism earlier today. We are thankful to our local teams that responded immediately and resolved this issue as quickly as possible. Anyone still experiencing issues should restart their modem and/or cable box.”
A few touchdowns had been scored by the time of the tweet, but the halftime show with Rihanna had not yet begun.
Fortune has reached out to Comcast for comment.
Complaints about the outage, not surprisingly, flooded social media.
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