DeKalb County: Comcast Xfinity outage slowed government functions

A screenshot of DeKalb County's website notifying customers that an internet outage is affecting some government functions.

A screenshot of DeKalb County's website notifying customers that an internet outage is affecting some government functions.

A widespread internet outage temporarily affected some DeKalb County departments on Friday.

Andrew Cauthen, a county spokesman, said certain functions affecting customers were affected during the morning. The system was back to normal function by 12:30 p.m., he said.

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Clerk of Superior Courts Debra DeBerry posted on Twitter that the outage affected an online system for looking up court cases.

“Due to a Comcast outage, The Clerk of Superior Court’s Office and the DeKalb County Courthouse communications are down, affecting our Odyssey systems,” she wrote. “We will advise when systems are restored. We apologize for any inconvenience.”

The planning and sanitation departments and the tax collector’s office were also affected, Cauthen said.

Comcast released a statement attributing the outage to a line cut by another company’s workers restoring electricity after Thursday night’s storm.

“At approximately 5 a.m. on August 10, a local utility company repairing power lines from a fallen tree, severed Comcast fiber optic cable lines, in an effort to restore the power lines,” the statement said. “As a result, many customers in the Decatur area experienced a loss of services for a few hours. Comcast crews worked diligently to repair the lines and all services are now restored. We apologize for the inconvenience that this caused.”