Comcast business phone service is down and small businesses are freaking out

Comcast’s business phone service seems to be having a huge nationwide outage. While the company acknowledged that some customers may be experiencing problems with phone service, the issue seems to be pretty widespread, with reported outages in dozens of cities across the country.

Apparently inbound and outbound calls are either not being completed at all, or are met with a recording saying the number is no longer in service. Comcast has a forum post that says the outage is effecting SMB (small to medium business) voice service only.

While some of us may no longer think landlines are necessary, the reality is that they are the lifeblood of millions of small businesses across the country.

And those small businesses aren’t happy. Thousands are taking to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to let their customers know that they are still open during the outage.

While some are non-essential businesses, the outage is also effecting urgent-care locations like local police departments and emergency veterinary hospitals, which are technically set up as small businesses.

Typically, most of us are accustomed to the internet going out and landlines being the only reliable way to communicate in an emergency. It seems that today the opposite it true, and people are turning to services like Twitter and Facebook to communicate with their customer base.

We’ve reached out to Comcast and will update this post if we get any new information from them.