Comcast Denying Access to Google Sites in Massachusetts?

Last Update: See this post for a follow-up on the Comcast situation.

Users of Comcast’s Internet services in Massachusetts are unable to access Google sites, Google Watch has learned.

Internet users woke up this morning to find that Internet access worked fine for all sites except Google and Google’s services, such as Google Calendar and Gmail.

A Google spokesperson confirmed that a small portion of Google users in Massachusetts were having difficulty accessing Google services. The search engine is working with the ISPs to investigate.

“I’m in Boston and I’ve been having problems all day as well,” wrote a poster on the Boston Craigslist forums. “Just a scary thought…I’ve become so dependent on Google, including calendar and gmail and task list, that I don’t know what I’m supposed to do today.”

According to uncomfirmed reports, the issue may also involve the Firefox browser. More to come as we have it.

This is not the first time Google and Comcast have had problems. Google denied some Comcast customers access to its services in 2002when the search company charged the ISP with hosting some accounts that had abused its terms of service by performing “automated queries.”

Update: If you’ve got more info about this outage, please leave it in the comments. If you’re handy with a command line interface, you may want to do a trace route on Google to see where the connection is dropping.

Update 2: Bostonist notes that access to YouTube may be affected also.

Update 3: Tom at Metroblogging Boston says you can substitute Google’s IP address for the domain nameto get everything working in the interim.

Update 4:It’s impossible to get anyone at Comcast on the phone. I added a question mark to the headline since this problem hasn’t been confirmed with Comcast, just several Comcast users. I did speak to a Comcast rep just now, and she’s looking into everything with the operations folks and will get back in touch.

Update:A Comcast representative phoned back to say that Comcast had a problem with a DNS server in MA. It’s been taken off line and traffic is being redirected. They could provide no more information.