Comcast's Xfinity Stream Outage Had Terrible Timing For NFL Fans

Comcast has confirmed that a widespread service outage impacting its Xfinity Stream app, making it unavailable for football fans who were relying on the platform as their NFL Sunday kickoff destination, has been fixed. The outage had started at around 1 p.m. Eastern time, seemingly affecting a sizeable percentage of users across the service and even the Xfinity Stream website, which displayed an error message when accessed. Service was fully restored at approximately 4 p.m. Eastern time.

The company had originally said it was working to fix the problem, but hadn't yet provided any specifics on what had caused the outage nor when it expected to restore access. Based on reports across social media, some users were seeing a message warning that they didn't have access to any channels, while others were seeing an error that stated the channel guide was unavailable. The Xfinity Stream website, meanwhile, showed a message telling users to clear their browser's cache or try restarting their internet modem, but neither troubleshooting method fixed the problem.

The Xfinity Stream service revolves around an app that makes it possible to watch TV on any supported device, such as a tablet or smartphone. The app — which first launched back in 2017 — is available to both Xfinity TV and Internet customers, and live sports is one of the perks available through it. Though some users were able to default to their cable box during the outage, cord-cutters didn't have that luxury.

Unfortunately, this wasn't the first time sports fans had to deal with a last-minute outage removing their access to a game — particularly fans who pay for Comcast's services. In February 2023, some Xfinity customers in Philadelphia were hit with a service outage on Super Bowl Sunday a couple of hours before the game kicked off. In that case, it took the company around three hours to restore the service to thousands of affected customers, and though specifics weren't provided, Comcast had confirmed at the time that vandalism had caused that particular outage.