Internet users across the northeastern U.S. experienced widespread downtime for several hours on Tuesday, interrupting work and school because of an unspecified problem on the Verizon network.
“An internet problem affecting the quality of our Fios service across the Northeast has been resolved,” said spokesman Rich Young in a statement sent by email on Tuesday afternoon. He said that service levels “are returning to normal” and that the company is investigating what happened. The service interruptions were not related to a fiber cut in Brooklyn, New York, which caused problems for people in the area.
There are approximately 6.5 million internet customers for Fios.
Downdetector, which tracks internet problems, has been posting alerts and updates about outages all day, with some problems being reported as early as Monday night. Zoom was affected like Microsoft Teams.
Most interruptions started around 11:30 am. Almost 30 were reported during the morning. And several other companies joined the list later.
Among the companies affected are Bandwidth, based in Raleigh, and Epic Games, Fortnite publisher.
The disruption affected internet and cloud providers, as well as major sites like Google and Facebook. Amazon, whose Web services division provides a wide range of online services, indicated that its network was not the cause of the problem and that connectivity issues for its Amazon Web Services customers were resolved around 12:45 pm, after an hour and a half. Google said it also found no problems with its own services and is investigating.
For updates, check Downdetecor Twitter feed.
Major Internet disruption hits the US, reaching a wide variety of services and companies, and then decreases