Verizon FiOS customers across the Northeast suffered from slow and irregular internet service during an apparent outage on Tuesday.
More than 21,000 users in New York City, Baltimore, Philadelphia and other major cities on the east coast said they had trouble loading web pages and slow upload and download speeds, according to the interruption tracking website Downdetector.com.
Problems started to appear around 11:30 am and persisted until early afternoon, according to Downdetector reports.
Verizon’s customers complained about the problems on Twitter, where the telecommunications giant said it was investigating a possible outage that it attributed to cutting a fiber cable in Brooklyn.
“There is a fiber cut and it has been reported, our technicians know; [they are] working to resolve it as quickly as possible, ” Verizon tweeted.
Users also reported disruptions to a wide range of important Internet services at the same time as Verizon, including Zoom, Gmail, Microsoft Office 365 and Amazon Web Services, according to Downdetector.
These services have become crucial for people who work from home and students who attend school remotely because of the coronavirus pandemic.
It is unclear whether the reported outages were related to Verizon’s problems.
Amazon Web Services said that some East Coast customers had “connectivity issues” with an Internet service provider from 11:26 am to 12:46 pm, but AWS services themselves were operating normally.
A Verizon spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.