Comcast customers on the West Coast will be able to get $5 credits due to a multihour Internet outage that happened Monday night.

Though Internet service providers might offer refunds to customers who call and complain, they aren't generally in the habit of proactively issuing refunds after outages. But Comcast, the country's largest cable and broadband company, has been trying to improve its reputation for awful customer service.

"We are directly reaching out to those who reported problems last night to offer our apologies and a credit for lost service," Comcast Senior VP Mark Muehl wrote in a blog post yesterday. The credit will be $5, USA Today reported.

Customers who didn't complain during the outage won't have to call and beg for a refund, but they also won't get it automatically—they'll have to visit a website.

"We are also building a website that impacted customers can visit to receive their credit," Comcast wrote. "We will update this post with a link to that site as soon as it is available and will share the link on Twitter through our customer support handle @comcastcares."

Separately, Comcast recently made it easier for customers to get credits when a technician is late for an appointment. Instead of customers having to request the $20 credit, now they automatically get it when Comcast's GPS devices indicate that a technician missed the two-hour appointment window.

As for this week's outage, Comcast said that "Internet service for a number of our customers in the western part of the country was degraded or unavailable for several hours. We had a team on this immediately and were able to restore full service to most customers by 9pm PT."

A DNS problem was the cause, Comcast said:

What happened A piece of hardware in our backbone network failed yesterday morning. Hardware issues of this sort are fairly commonplace and redundancy in our network addressed any immediate concern. Most backbone networks, including Comcast’s, are designed to heal themselves and route traffic along alternate paths much like a detour would route automobile traffic around a street closed for construction. One type of traffic that gets automatically rerouted is Domain Name System (DNS) traffic. Unfortunately, some of that traffic shifted in an unexpected way and overloaded local DNS server capacity causing many customers to experience service interruptions. What we are doing about it Since the incident, we have been working non-stop to fully understand the problem and bring additional DNS capacity online in the affected areas, so we can prevent it from happening again.

"Many customers reported intermittently poor service all day Monday but around 6:30 pm Pacific time it went out entirely for many," USA Today wrote, adding that the outage affected "a broad swath of California, Oregon and Washington."