This Comcast outage is what I was talking about a week ago. The problems I was having before the two big blowouts were DNS because I could ping the Comcast gateway, but was getting about 50% packet loss to the DNS machines. So, the question I have is this: did Comcast know of the problems early on and just didn't get them cleared up before they became massive or were my problems early warning signs of problems that hadn't reached "get the story in c|net" proportions?

Somehow I think it was the latter. Comcast was unable to use the information they were getting from customers like me because they were focused on treating symptoms rather than root causes. Being able to get that information and understand it could have saved lots of customers the outage and Comcast the embarrassment.