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Update 7:14 p.m. — Xfinity VP of Communications Jennifer Bilotta wrote me an email! Here’s what she said:
Hi Collin – update for your story:
All services should now be restored to customers in Kensington and Fishtown that were impacted by an outage caused by vandalism earlier today. We are thankful to our local teams that responded immediately and resolved this issue as quickly as possible. Anyone still experiencing issues should restart their modem and/or cable box.
Let’s hope as few customers as possible missed Jalen Hurts opening drive touchdown. It’s 7-7 with 2:24 left in the first quarter.
Update 5:55 p.m. — Xfinity claims the issue is now down to “a few thousand customers,” and that it was an intentional act of vandalism or sabotage. That won’t be much comfort to the residents of the Fishtown and Northern Liberties area, who hopefully can find a bar or restaurant that can still take them in for the game.
We could be looking at the biggest disaster in Philadelphia since the 1964 Phillies blew a 6.5 game lead in the NL East with 12 to play.
Right now Comcast/Xfinity, the biggest provider of cable and internet service in the Philadelphia area, is having a major outage, per multiple reports from the city. People are tweeting Comcast/Xfinity is telling customers they might have an outage until 6 p.m. ET.
The Philadelphia Eagles are scheduled to play in the Super Bowl at with kickoff scheduled for 6:30 p.m. ET. Oh, this could be terrible.
Holy crap. Half of Philadelphia is currently experiencing a cable and Internet outage and Comcast/Xfinity are now saying it may not be back up until 6pm #SuperBowl pic.twitter.com/juKemkuvYp
— Dan (from Steely Dan) (@orencamera) February 12, 2023
Yes, that’s the same Xfinity as in Xfinity Live, the post-game entertainment and dining space that’s just steps from Lincoln Financial Field. They may never get another customer, subscriber, or bar patron if this doesn’t get fixed by kickoff.
Also it’s probably not the best time for Xfinity to be airing a 30 second spot for their new “Xfinity 10G network,” which is currently scheduled for the third quarter of the game.
If you’re an Xfinity customer, you can check your service status here.
While this won’t affect DirecTV or other customers, anyone planning on watching the game via a streaming service, or who has cut the cord and uses a streamer such as YouTube TV or Hulu TV, would be out of luck for the Super Bowl in which the Eagles are playing.
If Eagles fans do have to watch the game on their cell phones, they can do so at this link from Fox Sports until the outage is potentially over.