At Verizon Communications Inc.
VZ -3.17%
The network’s failure on Tuesday slowed down internet service for some major customers in the Northeastern United States, triggering a cascade of outages that blocked access to many online applications.
The company had not fixed the source of the failure since Tuesday afternoon. A Verizon spokesman said the network had suffered degraded service, which made some high-bandwidth applications no longer work. A separate fiber-optic line cut in Brooklyn has disrupted broadband service for about 1,000 customers, but has not been linked to wider network problems in the region, according to the spokesman.
Network engineers writing on public message boards have reported problems with reaching Verizon and other services that rely on its systems from about 11:30 a.m. Eastern Time until early afternoon. The decline affected customers around New York, Philadelphia and Washington, DC Service later returned to normal levels.
Several Twitter users have reported problems with Slack Technologies services Inc.,
THE WORK 0.38%
Zoom video communications Inc.,
ZM -4.45%
Amazon and Google Gmail web services.
At 12:20 p.m., AWS stated on its status page that it “is investigating connectivity issues with an Internet provider, which mainly affects the East Coast of the United States, outside the AWS network.”
Zoom’s status page has noticed degraded performance on much of its platform. Google and Slack status pages did not present current issues. Google said it had found no problems with its services, and Slack said the incident appeared to be isolated from the East Coast.
The incident is the latest large-scale disruption of technology services that homeworkers and students have relied on since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Users of the Google and Slack suite of services have also recently experienced interruptions. Temporary outages for popular online services are relatively common, although their effect has increased as more companies outsource their digital infrastructure and tools, often to large Internet companies.
Internet measurement company Kentik Inc. found that data traffic to Verizon fell 12 percent during the event, suggesting that many other regions of the United States remained online. Verizon Fiber Optic Spine provides information for a wide range of web companies and other network operators.
Defective equipment sometimes leads to widespread failures on the Internet, although software errors and human errors often cause the most significant disruptions. Time Warner Cable blamed an overnight maintenance error for a 2014 network outage that lasted more than an hour.
Write to Dave Sebastian at [email protected] and Drew FitzGerald at [email protected]
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