Verizon outages menace East Coast networks
An internet outage menaced Verizon users from Washington, D.C., to New York City on Tuesday, throwing a wrench into the middle of the day for workers and students stuck at home during the pandemic.
By evening, Verizon said the issue had been fixed, but the cause of the widespread crash remained unclear.
“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,” Chris Serico, a Verizon spokesperson, said in an email to the Daily News.
A wave of landline and mobile difficulties appeared to begin late in the morning on a snowy workday. And shortly after 12 p.m., reported problems with Verizon service had reached a peak on DownDetector, a service that tracks digital blackouts.
Meanwhile, Verizon’s support account on Twitter fielded a flurry of complaints.
“We have been informed of a potential outage in the area and our technicians are working to resolve as quickly as possible,” Verizon Support tweeted at 12:08 p.m., responding to one query about New York City.
In another post, shortly before noon, Verizon Support said: “There is a fiber cut in Brooklyn.” (The break didn’t appear to account for all the outages.)
DownDetector reported that areas with the highest volume of complaints included Brooklyn, Queens, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.
The crash appeared to trigger frustrations with other services tied to wireless. Reported issues also spiked on Google, Zoom and YouTube on Tuesday, according to DownDetector.
