Comcast broadband down for around five hours

A Comcast broadband outage affected the Chicago area and other parts of the Midwest Sunday evening and into early Monday, according to company officials.

Internet service was unavailable in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Minnesota starting at approximately 7:30 p.m., said Comcast spokeswoman Angelynne Amores. Phone and cable television services were not affected by the outage, she said.

As of 11:45 p.m. Sunday Comcast representatives said they did not know when the service would be restored, and did not know the reason for the outage. However, officials at around 12:30 a.m. Monday said via Twitter that service to most customers had been restored. The company had been updating its Twitter customer service account, @comcastcares, to keep customers updated on the situation.

William Gerth, a Comcast official, said cause was likely a Domain Name System issue. A cause was still yet unidentified as of Monday morning, Comcast officials said.

If the problem has persisted, to temporarily fix the issue Comcast recommended users change their router's DNS to Google's public DNS. Google's public DNS IP addresses are 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. For instructions on how to change your settings visit code.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/using.html#setup