Charter Communications Comments on Major Internet Outage

We noticed that Charter Communications was having Internet outage issues this afternoon and it looks like reports are coming in across the country that there are issues. We reached out to one of our Charter contacts here in St. Louis and found out that they were well aware of the issue and are looking into it. Here is the exact statement:

“We are aware of the Internet issue for some of our customers in Missouri and Illinois. We are working as quickly as possible to restore service, and are investigating the cause of the issue.”

It being 9pm (CT) on the weekend we were happy that Charter was as responsive as they were .Thousands of comments were being reported on downdetector.com, but it appears some people are able to get back online by changing their Domain Name System (DNS) settings to something other than Charter. If you wanted to give that a shot you can try switching over to the service offered by Google. According to Google, as of 2013, Google Public DNS is the largest public DNS service in the world, handling more than 130 billion requests per day. Google Public DNS operates recursive name servers for public use at the following IP addresses: 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 for IPv4 service, as well as 2001:4860:4860::8888 and 2001:4860:4860::8844, for IPv6 access. Be sure to write down the Charter DNS server addresses just in case you’d like to switch back to it after the issues are resolved.

Please let us know if that works for you and if it does it might mean that Charter is dealing with a massive DNS attack or multiple failures that may take time time to get sorted out.