Widespread internet outages hit Northeast U.S.

Internet users across the Northeast U.S. reported widespread outages Tuesday.

In an emailed statement 90 minutes after the outage was first reported, Verizon said that it was working on the problem hurting Fios service “throughout the Northeast corridor” and that some service had already been restored.

The telecom giant had reported a cut fiber in Brooklyn via Twitter, although it’s not clear if that issue was responsible for the outage. A Verizon spokesperson said the company was still working to identify the root cause as of 4:30 p.m. Tuesday.

“An internet issue impacting the quality of our Fios service throughout the Northeast has been resolved, and network performance and service levels are returning to normal,” spokesman Christopher Serico said in an email.

Philadelphia-based Comcast, another major internet service provider, said it had not observed problems with its network Tuesday.

People posting on Twitter reported having issues connecting with various online services in a geographic area stretching from Washington to Boston. That densely populated region includes key U.S. government services as well as major financial companies such as Fidelity Investments.

The number of outages reported by Philadelphia Verizon customers peaked at 3,309 just after noon, according to Downdetector, a website that tracks outages. Downdetector collects status reports from sources including Twitter and reports submitted through its website.

Charles Trujillo was working from his Fairmount home when his screen went dark during an 11:30 a.m. call with colleagues. He said his internet connection was unstable for about two hours as he tried rebooting his router and contacting Verizon, all to no avail.

The Accenture employee was able to get some work done with his smartphone, but the outage “really put a dent in my work day,” he said. He posted a photo on Twitter of Bernie Sanders wearing his winter coat and mittens while sitting next to a dark computer screen. “Me waiting for Fios to fix my internet,” the 24-year-old wrote, garnering more than 70 likes.

Diana Gaspar's daughter in New York couldn't connect to her online classroom because their home internet was spotty for a couple of hours in the afternoon, although her daughter was able to log in with Gaspar's phone.

“We didn't see it as a major issue," Gaspar said. “The only inconvenience was me not having my phone.”

The outage affected internet and cloud providers as well as major sites such as Google and Facebook. Amazon, whose web services division powers a wide ranges of online services, indicated its network wasn't the cause of the problem.

It said that for about an hour and a half, ending at around 12:45 p.m. Eastern, some customers on the East Coast had problems connecting to Amazon Web Services, or AWS. It said its services were operating normally.

Google said it also had not found issues with its own services and was investigating.

The 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 analysis at Kentik, a network monitoring company. He reported a 12% drop in traffic volume to Verizon.

Madory said he did not yet know if other carriers were impacted.

Disruptions to internet services are always a hassle but have become even more excruciating as the pandemic forces millions of people to work from home and students to attend school remotely.

“Widespread internet outages in the area impacting remote learning today,” Galvin Middle School in Wakefield, Mass., a suburb north of Boston, lamented in a tweet. “Stay patient and do best you can. It’s out of our control. Hopefully things will be resolved soon!”

Reached on the phone at Galvin Middle School, Trish Dellanno said that those students who were learning remotely got paper assignments. “Teachers have been able to keep on moving. They’re going old school.”

Cary Wiedemann, a network engineer who had connectivity problems at his home in Northern Virginia, said that some online services could have been disrupted even if your home internet still worked, if the issue was with the backbone of Verizon's network.

“If Outlook works but YouTube doesn’t, whose fault is it? Verizon’s fault. But that’s not obvious from the onset,” he said.

Staff writer Christian Hetrick contributed to this article.