“An Internet issue affecting the quality of our Fios service in the Northeast has been resolved,” spokesman Rich Young said in an email on Tuesday afternoon. He said service levels were “returning to normal” and the company was investigating what happened. The service interruptions are not related to the cut fiber in Brooklyn, New York, which caused problems for people in the area.
There are about 6.5 million Fios Internet customers.
People who posted on Twitter reported that they had problems with various online services in the region that stretched from Washington, DC to Boston. The densely populated area contains important US government services as well as large financial companies such as Fidelity Investments.
Interruptions to internet services are always a hassle, but they are becoming even more gripping as the pandemic forces millions of people to work from home and students to attend school remotely.
Diana Gaspar’s daughter in New York could not connect with her online classroom because their home internet was mocking for several hours in the afternoon, although her daughter was able to log in with Gaspar’s phone.
“We did not see it as a big deal,” Gaspar said. “The only inconvenience was that I did not have my phone.”
For the Fairfax County Public Schools in Washington, DC, suburbs, teachers and students have found solutions, such as switching to a different teaching platform if someone is not working, spokeswoman Lucy Caldwell said. When her third-grade teacher could not report to the educational software, a gym teacher told the children to learn independently instead, said Tracy Compton, a parent of Fairfax.
“My daughter came to me and I had to stop working and I had to work with her to carry out the assignment,” Compton said. Nothing that is frustrating technological issues are not uncommon with distance education.
At Galvin Middle School in Wakefield, Massachusetts, a suburb north of Boston, teachers sent students pen-and-paper assignments if there were Internet problems, said Trish Dellanno, who was reached by phone at the school. “Teachers could keep moving. They’re going to old school.”
The disruption affected Internet and cloud providers as well as major websites such as Google and Facebook. Amazon, of which the Web Services division has a wide range of online services, indicated that the network was not the cause of the problem and that the connectivity issues for Amazon customers at Amazon Web Services were resolved after one and a half hours. Google said it also did not find any problems with its own services and that it was investigating.
According to Doug Madory, director of internet analytics at Kentik, a network monitoring company, the East Coast outages started at 11:25 local time and recovered at 12:37 pm. He reported a 12% drop in traffic volume to Verizon.
Madory said he did not yet know if other airlines were affected. Comcast, another major Internet service provider, said it had not noticed any problems with its network on Tuesday. AT&T said that the internet is not provided in the northeast of the house, and that customers are not affected.
Cary Wiedemann, a network engineer who had connectivity issues at his home in Northern Virginia, said some online services could be interrupted, even if your Internet was still working, if the problem was with the Verizon network.
“If Outlook works, but YouTube does not, whose fault is it? Verizon’s fault. But it’s not clear from the start,” he said.
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This story has been revised to correct the spelling of the network monitoring firm Kentik. It has also been updated to correct the name of the Verizon spokesman. This is Rich Young, not Jim Greer.
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