Comcast customers in Palo Alto are without phone and internet service Friday, Jan. 2, due to an outage.

The outage was caused by a non-Comcast construction crew that was cutting into the asphalt with saws near the intersection of Sheridan and Park Boulevard in Palo Alto. The crew damaged a "clearly marked" fiber-optic line in several places, said Bryan Byrd, director of communications for Comcast California.

"It took extra time to repair because we had to dig into the ground and access the problem and re-splice in more than one place," Byrd said.

As of 10 p.m. Friday, almost all Palo Alto customers should see services start to come back up, he said.

Comcast users began flocking to Twitter to report outages early Friday afternoon.