“An Internet issue affecting the quality of our Fios service in the Northeast has been resolved,” spokesman Rich Young said in an emailed statement Tuesday afternoon. He said service levels are “returning to normal” and the company is investigating what happened. The service outages were not related to a cut fiber in Brooklyn, New York, which caused problems for people in the area.
There are approximately 6.5 million Fios internet customers.
People posting to Twitter reported having problems connecting to various online services in the region stretching from Washington, DC to Boston. That densely populated area includes major US government departments as well as major financial firms such as Fidelity Investments.
Internet service disruptions have always been a hassle, but have become even more unbearable as the pandemic forces millions of people to work from home and students to go to school remotely.
Diana Gaspar’s daughter in New York couldn’t connect to her online classroom because their internet at home was spotty for a few hours in the afternoon, although her daughter could log in with Gaspar’s phone.
“We didn’t see it as a big problem,” said Gaspar. “The only inconvenience was that I didn’t have my phone.”
For the Fairfax County Public Schools in the suburbs of Washington, DC, teachers and students found workarounds, such as switching to a different instruction platform when one didn’t work, spokeswoman Lucy Caldwell said. When her third-grade daughter’s teacher couldn’t log in to the education software they were using, a PE teacher came and told the kids to learn on their own instead, Fairfax parent Tracy Compton said.
“My daughter came to me and I had to stop working and I had to work with her to complete the assignment,” said Compton, nothing that frustrating technical difficulties are not uncommon in distance learning.
At Galvin Middle School in Wakefield, Massachusetts, a suburb north of Boston, teachers would send students pen-and-paper assignments when there were Internet problems, said Trish Dellanno, who was at the school by phone. ‘Teachers have been able to keep moving. They’re going old school. ‘
The outage affected internet and cloud providers and large sites such as Google and Facebook. Amazon, whose web services division operates a wide variety of online services, said its network was not the source of the problem and that connectivity issues for its Amazon Web Services customers were resolved at around 12:45 PM, after an hour and a half. Google said it also found no issues with its own services and was investigating.
The East Coast power outage began at 11:25 a.m. local time and the recovery began at 12:37 a.m., according to Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik, a network surveillance company. He reported a 12% drop in traffic volume to Verizon.
Madory said he did not yet know if other carriers had been affected. Comcast, another major ISP, said on Tuesday it had not found any problems with its network. AT&T said it does not provide home internet in the Northeast and it did not affect customers.
Cary Wiedemann, a network engineer who had connectivity issues at his home in Northern Virginia, said some online services could be disrupted even if your internet was still working at home, if the problem was related to the Verizon network backbone.
“If Outlook works but YouTube doesn’t, whose fault is it? Verizon’s fault. But that’s not clear from the start,” he said.
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This story has been revised to correct the spelling of the network surveillance 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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