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Comcast to send $5 refunds for West coast outage

Elizabeth Weise
USA TODAY
A map from Downdetector.com showing an Internet outage that hit Comcast customers on Monday, June 1, 2015.

SAN FRANCISCO - Comcast plans to send proactive $5 refunds to customers on the West coast who dealt with degraded Internet service Monday night between 6:30 and 9:30 Pacific time, the company said.

Many customers reported intermittently poor service all day Monday but around 6:30 pm Pacific time it went out entirely for many.

The problem began with the failure of a piece of hardware in the company's Internet backbone on Monday morning, Comcast said is a blog post Tuesday.

Normally the system would route traffic around the problem and customers would not experience any issues.

However on Monday "some of that traffic shifted in an unexpected way and overloaded" the local server capacity, which caused many customers to experience service interruptions, the post said.

A broad swath of California, Oregon and Washington was affected. Customers who used Comcast's Internet service were offline, though cable TV continued to function.

Comcast spokeswoman Jennifer Khoury said the company will proactively send the credit to affected customers. The $5 refund is about five times what most customers pay for three hours of Internet connection.

If customers don't get a credit, and live within the outage zone, they can go to the blog post, which will be updated with a link where they can apply for the credit, she said.

"We know that having a fast, reliable connection to the Internet is vital and that interruptions of this sort are unacceptable. We're sorry that we didn't live up to that last night," Comcast said in its post.

The telecom company announced in early May it would revamp customer service after being slammed for poor help.

Comcast is often given one of the lowest rankings on consumer satisfaction surveys. In 2014 it was named "Worst Company in America" by Consumerist.

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