KING COUNTY, Wash. — A Comcast team is in South Lake Union restored Internet, phone and TV to 33,000 people who couldn't call 911 from their landline phones on Thursday afternoon.
King Co. Emergency Management says there was no impact in local 911 centers, but advised people to call via cell phones.
Comcast internet, TV and phone service went out Thursday morning for some customers in Seattle.
It was believed that a fiber optic line was damaged about 8:45 a.m. in the Madison Park area. It's not clear what caused the damage.
Companies affected by Thursday's Comcast outage either sent workers home or went scrambling to find the nearest coffee shop with a different Internet service provider.
At Add 3, a Capitol Hill ad agency, workers abandoned their desks and set up shop elsewhere.
"This is pretty disruptive," Brian Rauschenbach said.
Rauschenbach runs Add 3 and another business that relies exclusively on Internet service.
"We work with Google, Bing, and a lot of our work is done on their platforms," Rauschenbach added. "We have to be online all the time."
So, when the Internet went down, he and his employees couldn't afford to take a day off.
"A lot of employees called different locations to see if they had CenturyLink. This coffee shop fortunately has a different service provider," Rauschenbach said.
Rauschenbach and some of his employees went to Cherry Street Coffee.
Because of that, business was booming today.
"We had a ton of people coming in." Cherry Street barista Sidnie Kleiva said. "Every chair was filled with laptops because the Internet was down."
But it was a different story at Kaladi Brothers, a coffee shop that relies on Comcast.
"When they find out the WiFi is out, they just let because people come to coffee shops to sit and work on the Internet," Olivia Morrow, a barista at Kaladi Brothers, explained.
Business is down at Kaladi Brothers at least 25 percent because of the outage.
But that's not the only thing frustrating people; no one was able to get a clear answer from Comcast all day about when service would be restored.
"Okay, that's not really helping us," Morrow said. "We don't have something we can tell our customers."
"I wish they had better notification of what actually happened," Rauschenbach added.
Comcast will not issue a blanket refund to customers because of what happened Thursday, but is encouraging people to call on a case-by-case basis to be made whole. A spokesman for the company also said they will study the situation to see how to prevent this from happening in the future, or at least be able to more quickly restore service.
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