At Verizon Communications Inc.
VZ -3.17%
the network’s failure on Tuesday slowed Internet service for some large business customers in the northeastern U.S., causing a cascade of crashes that blocked access to many online applications.
As of Tuesday afternoon, the company had not analyzed the source of the failure. A Verizon spokesman said the network was suffering from degraded service, which caused some high-bandwidth applications to stop working. A separate fiber-optic line cut in Brooklyn disrupted broadband service for about 1,000 customers, but it was not related to the region’s wider network problems, according to the spokesman.
Network engineers writing on public message boards reported that they had arrived at Verizon and other services that depend on its systems from 11:30 a.m. Eastern to early afternoon. The lapse affected customers in New York, Philadelphia and Washington, DC. The service later returned to normal levels.
Several Twitter users reported problems with Slack Technologies services Inc.,
WORK 0.38%
Zoom Video Communications Inc.,
ZM -4.45%
Google Web Services and Google Gmail.
At 12:20 p.m., AWS said on its status page that it was “investigating connectivity issues with an Internet provider, which mainly affect the east coast of the United States, outside the AWS network.”
The Zoom status page observed degraded performance across much of its platform. Google and Slack status pages show 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 in technology services, in which home workers and students have been relied on since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Users of the Google and Slack service packs have also been interrupted recently. Temporary outages of popular online services are relatively common, although their effect has increased as more companies outsource their digital infrastructure and tools, often to large Internet companies.
The Internet measurement company Kentik Inc. found that data traffic to Verizon fell 12% during the event, suggesting that many other regions of the United States remained online. Verizon’s fiber optic backbone provides information for a wide range of web businesses and other network operators.
Defective equipment sometimes causes widespread Internet failures, although software errors and human error often cause the most significant disruptions. Time Warner Cable blamed a one-day maintenance error for a 2014 network shutdown that lasted more than an hour.
Write to Dave Sebastian at [email protected] and Drew FitzGerald at [email protected]
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