Internet users across the northeast U.S. experienced widespread outages for several hours Tuesday, interrupting work and school because of an unspecified Verizon network issue.
Internet users across the northeast US experienced widespread outages for several hours on Jan 26, interrupting work and school because of an unspecified Verizon network issue.
Widespread Internet Outages Hit Northeast U.S.
Internet users across the northeast U.S. experienced widespread outages for several hours Tuesday, interrupting work and school because of an unspecified Verizon network issue.
“An internet issue impacting the quality of our Fios service throughout the Northeast has been resolved,” said spokesman Rich Young in an emailed statement Tuesday afternoon. He said service levels “are returning to normal” and the company is investigating what happened. The service interruptions were unrelated to a cut fiber in Brooklyn, New York, which caused problems for people in the area.
There are about 6.5 million Fios internet customers.
Internet users across the northeast US reported widespread outages Tuesday that impacted businesses and employees working from home due to the lingering coronavirus pandemic.
Problems started around 11:00am ET and spanned from Washington DC up through Boston, leaving a number of major companies without service like Amazon Web Services, Zoom, Gmail and Slack - all of which are staples of remote workers.
DownDetector, which monitors such events, reported Verizon Fios users in New York City, Baltimore, Philadelphia and other major East Coast cities were unable load web pages or experienced slow speeds on the web.
In an emailed statement 90 minutes after the outage was first reported, Verizon said it was working on the problem hurting Fios service throughout the Northeast corridor and that some service had already been restored.
RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – From people shopping Amazon to trying to stream Hulu or wanting to play Fortnite and to big communications providers such as Verizon and Bandwidth, the operable word Tuesday is “outage.”
However, by 2 p.m. numerous services were returning to normal, based on a review of 48 website reports at Downdetector.com. But YouTube suffered a serious spike in outages a that time and other providers such as AT&T, CenturyLink and T-Mobile continued to have trouble at 3 p.m., Downtector showed.
By 4 p.m. some problems persisted but many charts showed a return to near-normal access.
Downdetector, which tracks internet troubles, has been posting alerts and updates about outages all day with some troubles being cited as early as Monday night. Zoom has been affected as Microsoft Teams.