Ari Ashe, wtop.com
WASHINGTON — Customers across Fairfax County and some in Fredericksburg complained about Internet problems Wednesday night.
Cox Communications tells WTOP that it’s a problem with one of its DNS servers, which affects customers nationwide.
A DNS server is what allows Internet service providers such as Cox Communications to give their customers public IP addresses so that they can surf the Internet.
Cox spokesman Mike Leone says the problem occurred late Monday evening at their Atlanta headquarters.
Leone adds that the problem is serious enough that it has asked for outside assistance to track down and solve the problem.
Nearly 10 percent of customers in Fairfax County and Fredericksburg lost service during the height of the outage, late Tuesday night.
Cox believes most customers should have their service back, but there will still be sporadic outages as technicians try to fix the core problem.
If you’ve been affected, Leone suggests trying to unplug your modem for about two minutes. Then, plug the modem back into your outlet and restart it.
In some cases, that will some the problem.
If that doesn’t work, Leone urges customers to call customer service:
- For Fairfax customers: 703-378-8422
- For Fredericksburg customers: 540-373-6343
For more advanced users, you can switch your Internet server to Google’s free DNS server.
Click for instructions to do so.
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(Copyright 2011 by WTOP. All Rights Reserved.)
