Starting 24 hours ago, nearly all Comcast subscribers were unable to access The Pirate Bay. Although Comcast is not the only ISP affected by the connectivity issue, the problems appear to be most widespread in their network. In an effort to resolve the problems, Comcast has offered The Pirate Bay assistance from their engineers, to get to the bottom of the issue.

Yesterday TorrentFreak received several emails from worried Comcast subscribers who could no longer load their favorite BitTorrent site, The Pirate Bay.

A quick look at our web-analytics further revealed a bump in people searching Google for “thepiratebay down”.

The majority of these people showed up as Comcast subscribers, which led us to conclude that something is up with the connection between The Pirate Bay and the Comcast network.

This morning we wrote an article on the issue, mentioning that The Pirate Bay was trying to find the origin of the problem.

The report didn’t go unnoticed by Comcast either. In a response to the issue Jason Livingood, Executive Director Internet Systems Engineering at Comcast, told TorrentFreak: “Please note that we do not block websites and we are NOT blocking The Pirate Bay.”

As stated in the original article, we never suspected an intentional blockade, but something was clearly wrong. Luckily, Comcast is there to help The Pirate Bay get back on track.

Comcast has reached out to The Pirate Bay and set aside resources in case the BitTorrent site needs it. “I can have our engineers work directly with them to assist,” Jason Livingood told TorrentFreak.

Initially The Pirate Bay team suspected that Comcast might be filtering PMTU responses, but Comcast looked into this and ruled it out. At the moment The Pirate Bay team is looking at other possibilities, but Comcast is confident that they’re not causing the problem.

The Pirate Bay team prefers to keep the exact location of their core hardware somewhat of a mystery, and some of this network magic may conflict with Comcast at the moment. It’s expected that, with or without help from Comcast, the issues will be resolved soon.

Update: Right before we finished this article, Comcast users were able to connect to The Pirate Bay again. The issue was reverse path filtering in a Tier1 network Comcast traffic went through.

Comcast reached out to Serious Tubes Networks, who deliver transit to The Pirate Bay, and they were able to correct the issue.

“Comcast emailed our NOC about their users complaining about not reaching The Pirate Bay. We resolved the issue and TPB can now be reached from ComCast,” the CEO of Serious Tubes Networks told TorrentFreak.

Indeed, Comcast Cares, but the problem was fixed without their direct help.