“An internet problem that has affected the quality of our Fios service across the Northeast has been resolved,” spokesman Rich Young said in an emailed statement on Tuesday afternoon. He said 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.
People who post to Twitter reported having trouble connecting to various online services in the region from Washington, DC to Boston. This densely populated area includes major US government services, as well as major financial companies, such as Fidelity Investments.
Interruptions in Internet services are always a nuisance, but they have become even more painful as the pandemic forces millions of people to work from home and students to attend school remotely.
Diana Gaspar’s daughter in New York was unable to connect to the online classroom because the home internet was uneven for a few hours in the afternoon, although her daughter could connect with Gaspar’s phone.
“We didn’t see this as a big problem,” said Gaspar. “The only drawback was that I didn’t have my phone.”
For Fairfax County Public Schools in Washington, DC, suburbs, teachers and students have found alternative solutions, such as switching to another instructional platform if one was not working, said spokeswoman Lucy Caldwell. When her third-grade daughter’s teacher was unable to access the educational software they were using, a gym teacher came to tell the children to do independent learning, said Fairfax’s mother, Tracy Compton.
“My daughter came to me and I had to stop working and I had to work with her to do the task,” said Compton, nothing that frustrating technological problems are not uncommon in remote learning.
At Galvin Middle School in Wakefield, Massachusetts, a suburb north of Boston, teachers sent students paper and pen assignments if there were internet problems, said Trish Dellanno, contacted at the school by phone. “The teachers were able to move on. They are going to the old school.”
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.
The outages on the East Coast began at 11:25 am local time and the recovery at 12:37 pm, according to Doug Madory, director of internet analytics at Kentik, a network monitoring company. He reported a 12% drop in traffic volume for Verizon.
Madory said he still does not know whether other operators have been affected. Comcast, another major Internet service provider, said it saw no problems with its network on Tuesday. AT&T said it does not provide home internet in the Northeast and customers were not affected.
Cary Wiedemann, a network engineer who had connectivity problems at his home in Northern Virginia, said some online services could have been stopped even if his home Internet still worked, if the problem was with Verizon’s network backbone.
“If Outlook works, but YouTube doesn’t, who is to blame? Verizon’s fault. But that’s not obvious from the start,” he said.
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This story has been revised to correct the spelling of network monitoring company Kentik. It has also been updated to correct the name of the Verizon spokesperson. It’s Rich Young, not Jim Greer.
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