Verizon Communications Inc.
VZ -3.17%
a network outage on Tuesday slowed Internet service for some large business customers in the northeastern United States, triggering a cascade of disruptions that blocked access to many online applications.
The company did not identify the source of the failure until Tuesday afternoon. A spokesman for Verizon said the network had degraded the service, causing some high-bandwidth applications to stop working. A separate cut in the fiber optic line in Brooklyn disrupted broadband service for about 1,000 customers, but was not linked to the wider network problems in the region, according to the spokesman.
Network engineers who wrote on public message boards reported problems getting to Verizon and other services that depend on their systems around 11:30 am Eastern time, until early afternoon. The lapse affected customers in New York, Philadelphia and Washington, DC The service returned to normal levels.
Several Twitter users have reported problems with Slack Technologies services Inc.,
WORKS 0.38%
Zoom Video Communications Inc.,
ZM -4.45%
Amazon Web Services and Google Gmail.
At 12:20 pm, AWS said on its status page that it was “investigating connectivity issues with an ISP, primarily affecting the east coast of the United States, outside the AWS network.”
Zoom’s status page has seen degraded performance across much of its platform. The Google and Slack status pages showed no current problems. Google said it found no problems with its services, and Slack said the incident appeared to have occurred only on the East Coast.
The incident is the latest widespread disruption in technology services, of which domestic workers and students have been counting since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Users of Google’s service pack and Slack have also been disrupted recently. Temporary disruptions to popular online services are relatively common, although their effect has increased as more companies outsource their infrastructure and digital tools, usually to large Internet companies.
Internet measurement company Kentik Inc. found that data traffic to Verizon fell 12% during the event, suggesting that many other regions in the U.S. remained online. Verizon’s fiber optic backbone carries information to a wide range of Web companies and other network operators.
Faulty equipment sometimes leads to widespread Internet failures, although software failures and human errors often cause the most significant disruptions. Time Warner Cable blamed an overnight maintenance error for a network blackout in 2014 that lasted more than an hour.
Write to Dave Sebastian at [email protected] and Drew FitzGerald at [email protected]
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