Last night, my Internet connection got very choppy. I couldn’t pull up any sites in the browser and couldn’t ping any IPs at all. Stuff happens, so I went to sleep thinking that it would probably be fixed this morning.

Around 11am this morning, I notice that the lights are all solid green. So I try to pull up some sites in the browser, and I keep getting sent to a static “Welcome to Comcast…” page. Calling the Comcast support line, a customer support rep tells me that they need to reprovision some of the cable modems and that my service should be back up in an hour or two, but definitely by 2pm.

Being one of those people who can’t seem to live without the Internet, I call Comcast back around 2:30pm when I’m still getting the same static page.

This time a different rep tells me that the first rep was wrong, and it could take about 6 hours, so I should have service back by 5pm. Ok, again I think, stuff happens, who knows.

While knowing that the front-line tech support does not always know what is really happening in the field, I ask the rep what the problem was. He told me (and I assume with a straight face), that I hadn’t logged into my @comcast.net email account for a long time and it probably triggered a security issue.

Yes, that obviously must be the problem.

Update: After being down for more than 24 hours, my Comcast service is back up. The last tech support rep I talked to said that Comcast does indeed check email logins as a security measure, but that wasn’t related to my issue. There was some kind of upgrade around the Atlanta area that required my cable modem to be provisioned again. On the upside, my speeds do seem better than before.