A Verizon Communications Inc.
VZ -3.17%
network outage on Tuesday slowed Internet service for a number of large corporate customers in the northeastern US, triggering a cascade of outages that blocked access to many online applications.
The company had not identified the cause of the outage on Tuesday afternoon. A Verizon spokesperson said the network was experiencing service degradation, causing some high-bandwidth applications to stop working. A separate fiber-optic line in Brooklyn interrupted broadband service for about 1,000 customers, but was not tied to the wider network issues in the region, the spokesman said.
Network engineers writing on public bulletin boards reported problems reaching Verizon and other services that depend on their systems from approximately 11:30 a.m. Eastern Time until early afternoon. Decline affected customers in New York, Philadelphia and Washington, DC Service later returned to normal levels.
Several Twitter users reported problems with Slack Technologies services Inc.,
WORK 0.38%
Zoom video communication Inc.,
ZM -4.45%
Amazon Web Services and Google’s Gmail.
At 12:20 PM, AWS said on its status page that it was “investigating connectivity issues with an ISP, primarily on the East Coast of the United States, outside the AWS network.”
Zoom’s status page mentioned reduced performance on much of its platform. The Google and Slack status pages showed no current issues. Google said it found no problems with its services, and Slack said the incident appeared to be isolated on the East Coast.
The incident is the latest widespread disruption to technology services that homebound workers and students have relied on since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Users of Google’s and Slack’s suite of services have also suffered from outages recently. Temporary interruptions to popular online services are relatively common, although their impact 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 dropped 12% during the event, suggesting many other US regions remained online. Verizon’s fiber optic backbone contains information for a wide variety of web companies and other network operators.
Faulty equipment sometimes leads to widespread Internet outages, although software glitches and human error are often the main malfunctions. Time Warner Cable blamed an overnight maintenance bug 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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