Verizon FiOS customers in the Northeast suffered slow, erratic internet service during an apparent outage on Tuesday.
More than 21,000 users in New York City, Baltimore, Philadelphia and other major East Coast cities said they had trouble loading web pages and were experiencing slow upload and download speeds, according to the Downdetector crash tracking website .how
Problems began to emerge around 11:30 a.m. and persisted into the early afternoon, according to Downdetector reports.
Verizon customers complained about the problems on Twitter, where the telecommunications giant said it was studying a possible outage it attributed to a fiber cable cut in Brooklyn.
“There is a fiber cut and it has been reported that our technicians know it; [they are] working to resolve it as soon as possible ” Verizon tweeted.
Users also reported shutdowns for a wide range of important internet services at the same time as Verizon, including Zoom, Gmail, Microsoft Office 365 and Amazon Web Services, according to Downdetector.
These services have become crucial for people working from home and students attending distance school due to the coronavirus pandemic.
It’s unclear if these reported outages were related to Verizon issues.
Amazon Web Services said some East Coast customers had “connectivity issues” with an ISP from 11:26 a.m. to 12:46 p.m., but AWS’s own services worked normally.
A Verizon spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.