A Comcast service outage that started Saturday night was limiting cable-TV channels available to viewers. Problems in airing the pay-per-view Mayweather-Pacquiao boxing match also was frustrating some fight fans.
Comcast says cable service should be restored to all television customers in Washington state by late Saturday night after an outage knocked out a number of TV channels earlier in the evening.
Meanwhile, scores of angry tweets by U.S. boxing fans directed at various television providers across the country complained of problems ordering or watching the Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao prize fight, which was pushed back reportedly because of issues with the pay-per-view feed of the highly anticipated event.
Comcast spokesman Steve Kipp says the Washington state cable outage, which apparently started between 6 and 7 p.m. Saturday, has affected customers’ ability to view channels 30 and above. However, he said that customers were experiencing problems with those channels in varying degrees, with some unable to view any of the affected channels and others able to view some of them.
Comcast has 1.1 million customers in the state and is Seattle’s largest cable operator, with about 200,000 customers in the city.
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He said the outage was not linked to the issues that impacted viewing of the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight. Some users said when they tried to order the fight, it wasn’t available. Others complained of picture problems or an inability to tune to the pay-per-view channel.
Customer-service Twitter accounts for Dish Network and Cox Communications asked users whether they ordered standard definition or high-definition feeds of the fight, indicating there may have been issues with the standard-definition feed. A similar account for DirecTV referred users to a troubleshooting website.
The bout was expected to be the most popular in pay-per-view history, with an estimated 3 million households buying the fight at nearly $100 each.
“We’re seeing and gracefully managing a lot of demand — which is a good thing,” Dish Network spokesman Bob Toevs said.
On April 9, about 30,000 Seattle-area customers lost Comcast service after a construction crew severed a fiber-optic trunk line in South Lake Union. In that outage, which happened in the morning, service was restored to most customers by evening.