Power, Internet Outages Created over Weekend in Needham

Outages made for a frustrating weekend for many Needham residents as power and internet went out in two separate instances.

On Saturday, diners at and other establishments in the Heights area were left in the dark as a car accident at 6:15 p.m. on Rosemary St. took out a utility pole and the wires that service the area, according to Fire Chief Paul Buckley.

"The power had to be shut down purposely for safety reasons, as there were live wires spread out over a large area and also contacting the fence around the pool, which energized the fence and caused a brush fire, as well," Buckley said.

Buckley also confirmed that the female driver in the accident was injured and transported by the Fire Department to the hospital.

In a completely unrelated matter, subscribers to Comcast's internet service were out of luck on Sunday evening when an internal problem caused thousands on the eastern seaboard to lose access to the web. The problem, as outlined by a Comcast spokesperson, was caused when Comcast's DNS servers failed. Outages have been confirmed in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Virginia and Maryland.

The timing is potentially hazardous for businesses as "Cyber Monday" is traditionally a day in which shoppers flock to the web for holiday deals. Comcast is saying, though, that service should have bee restored to most subscribers by late Sunday evening.

If you are still experiencing some issues with service, you can change your DNS server IP address to either 8.8.8.8 for Google's service or 208.67.220.220 for OpenDNS.