Verizon FiOS customers in the Northeast suffered from slow and spotty Internet service during an apparent outage on Tuesday.
More than 21,000 users in New York City, Baltimore, Philadelphia and other major cities on the East Coast said they had problems loading web pages and experienced slow upload and download speeds, according to the outage tracking website Downdetector.com.
The problems started to surface around 11:30 a.m. and persisted into the early afternoon, Downdetector reports.
Verizon customers complained about the problems on Twitter, where the telecom giant said it was investigating a possible outage due to a cut fiber optic cable in Brooklyn.
“There is a fiber break and it has been reported, our engineers know; [they are] are working to fix it ASAP, ” Verizon tweeted.
According to Downdetector, around the same time as Verizon, users also reported outages for a wide variety of major Internet services, including Zoom, Gmail, Microsoft Office 365 and Amazon Web Services.
Those services have become crucial for home workers and remote school students due to the coronavirus pandemic.
It’s unclear whether those reported glitches were related to the Verizon issues.
Amazon Web Services said some East Coast customers had “connection problems” with an ISP between 11:26 AM and 12:46 PM, but AWS’s own services were working normally.
A Verizon spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.