“An internet problem affecting the quality of our Fios service across the Northeast has been resolved,” spokesman Rich Young said in an email statement Tuesday afternoon. He said service levels are “returning to normal” and the company is investigating what happened. Service outages were not related to a fiber cut in Brooklyn, New York, that caused problems for people in the area.
There are approximately 6.5 million Fios internet customers.
People who post on Twitter have reported problems connecting to various online services in the region, from Washington, DC to Boston. This densely populated area includes key US government services as well as major financial companies such as Fidelity Investments.
Internet outages are always a hassle, but they have become even more torturous as the pandemic forces millions of people to work from home and students to attend distance school.
Diana Gaspar’s daughter from New York could not connect to the online classroom because the internet at home was inappropriate for a few hours in the afternoon, although her daughter was able to connect to Gaspar’s phone.
“I didn’t see it as a major problem,” Gaspar said. “The only downside was I didn’t have my phone.”
For public schools in Fairfax County, Washington, DC, suburbs, teachers and students have found alternative solutions, such as switching to another training platform if one does not work, said spokeswoman Lucy Caldwell. When her third-grade daughter’s teacher couldn’t connect to the education software they were using, a classroom teacher came to tell the children to learn independently, said Fairfax Father Tracy Compton.
“My daughter came to me and I had to stop working and I had to work with her to get the job done,” said Compton, “nothing unusual for frustrating technological problems with distance 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, who was contacted at the school by phone. “The teachers managed to keep going. I’m going to old school.”
The outage affected internet and cloud providers, as well as major sites such as Google and Facebook. Amazon, whose web services division offers a wide range of online services, said its network was not the cause of the problem and that connectivity issues for its customers at Amazon web services were resolved around 12:45 p.m. an hour and a half. Google said it also found no problems with its own services and is investigating.
East Coast outages began at 11:25 a.m. local time, and recovery began at 12:37 p.m., according to Doug Madory, director of internet analytics at Kentik, a network monitoring company. He reported a 12% drop in traffic to Verizon.
Madory said she did not yet know if other carriers had been affected. Comcast, another major Internet service provider, said it had no problems with its network on Tuesday. AT&T said it does not provide internet from home in the Northeast, and customers have not been affected.
Cary Wiedemann, a network engineer who had connectivity issues at his home in North Virginia, said some online services could be disrupted even if your home internet was still running, if the problem was with the spine. of the Verizon network.
“If Outlook works, but YouTube doesn’t, who’s 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 the Kentik network monitoring company. It has also been updated to correct the name of the Verizon spokesperson. It’s Rich Young, not Jim Greer.
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