Xfinity Was Down Monday Afternoon And Comcast Says A System Update Caused It

Comcast's Xfinity service went down Monday afternoon and came back up by 6 PM Eastern, a roughly two-hour outage that hit cable TV customers across the country, with the East Coast experiencing the heaviest impact.

Reports on Downdetector peaked at 26,278 individual complaints around 4:25 PM before steadily declining as connections were restored.

By 8 PM the report count had dropped to around 150.

The cause, per Comcast, was a system update gone sideways rather than a cyberattack or external failure. "Our customers are now up and running after a very brief interruption to their services due to a system update," a Comcast spokesperson said in a statement to Nexstar. "We apologize for the inconvenience."

The outage primarily affected cable TV rather than internet service, customers reported black screens with loading dots where their programming should have been.

The timing was particularly frustrating for anyone trying to watch the World Cup, which is generating record TV viewership this summer.

One viewer photographed their screen showing program guide information at the bottom against an otherwise black display with three white loading dots, the specific image that spread on social media and confirmed for others that the problem was on Comcast's end and not their equipment.

Xfinity Mobile was not affected since it runs on Verizon's wireless network.

The Xfinity status map itself was also struggling to load during peak outage hours, which was not helpful for customers trying to confirm whether the problem was nationwide or local.

If your cable came back on around 5 PM Monday and you missed the first half of something, that is why.