Photo by JosephLeonardo.

Comcast’s internet service went down on Sunday evening. (Of course, not that you’d have known it by looking at the company’s “Outage Check” website at any point last night.) Twitter blew up with complaints about the outage, and the service disruption is affecting a large portion of the East Coast.

DCist’s attempts to call the local Comcast office to obtain further information about the issue were unsuccessful — the automated message I was transferred to indicated that the call volume was too high, then bumped me off the line (after, of course, suggesting I check the company’s website for solutions to an internet outage issue). Other outlets who were more successful at actually reaching a representative report that Comcast wasn’t really offering any estimates as to when full service might be restored. Some Twitter users have reported getting service back, but it has not returned to DCist HQ in Northwest D.C. at post time. (UPDATE: The Baltimore Sun is quoting Comcast officials as saying that service had been restored in the 11 p.m. hour and that the company was “still gathering information” about what exactly had happened.)

Are you desperately seeking internet? There are options — as Rob Pegoraro of the Post and We Love DC (both possessing a far firmer grasp on the nitty-gritty of technological minutiae than yours truly) note, you can get around the outage by utilizing a public DNS instead of Comcast’s. Both OpenDNS and Google’s Public DNS appear to be working for Washington D.C. Comcast subscribers. (Yours truly has been using the latter option for the last hour or so; it has, so far, worked like a charm.) You can learn how to utilize those alternatives here (OpenDNS) and here (Google). Obviously, your mileage with either of these two alternatives may vary.