Comcast To Credit X1 Subs Affected By Outage

Comcast’s new customer experience leader apologized for recent outages of the MSO’s X1 service, announced that the MSO is reaching out to credit those subscribers, and also shed a little more light on what caused the problem in the first place.  

“We’re working now to identify the customers who were impacted to personally apologize and proactively give them credits which we plan to have out to them within the next two weeks,” Charlie Herrin, Comcast Cable’s SVP, customer experience, wrote in this blog post. “This issue was our fault and we want to make it right.”

Herrin didn’t detail the amount to be credited, but Comcast’s Customer Guarantee program shows that the operator typically offers $20 credits to customers if the operator is unable to “resolve a routine issue.”

As for the technical glitch that caused the problem, Herrin offered this explanation: “While we were deploying an upgrade to the X1 platform, we discovered an issue in the way the software that updates X1 was configured.  We immediately stopped the deployment, and our engineers began working to identify the root cause and fix the issue.”

He said service has returned to normal for most X1 customers, and that engineers are going back to take steps to prevent it from reoccurring, adding that the fix now in place should be automatic, meaning customers won’t need to reboot or power-cycle their boxes to restore services.

Reports of X1-related outages began to emerge Wednesday afternoon. Comcast’s X1 service also suffered temporary outages over the weekend due in part to connectivity issues between set-tops and data centers.