“An internet problem affecting the quality of our Fios service across the Northeast has been resolved,” spokesman Rich Young said in an email statement Tuesday afternoon. He said service levels are “back to normal” and the company is investigating what happened. Service outages were not related to a fiber cut in Brooklyn, New York, that caused problems for people in the area.
There are about 6.5 million Fios internet customers.
People posting on Twitter reported that they had issues related to various online services in the region, ranging from Washington, DC to Boston. This densely populated area includes key U.S. government services as well as major financial firms such as Fidelity Investments.
Interruptions to Internet services are always a nuisance, but they have become an even heavier experience as the pandemic forces millions of people to work from home and students to attend distance school.
Diana Gaspar’s daughter in New York could not connect to her online classroom because her home internet connection was erratic for a couple of hours in the afternoon, although her daughter was unable to log in. with Gaspar’s phone.
“We didn’t see it as an important issue,” Gaspar said. “The only downside was I didn’t have my phone.”
For Fairfax County public schools in Washington, DC, suburbs, teachers and students found solutions, such as switching to another instructional platform if it didn’t work, spokeswoman Lucy Caldwell said. When their third-grade daughter’s teacher was unable to log in to the educational software they were using, a gym teacher told the children to learn independently, said Tracy Compton, Fairfax’s father.
“My daughter came to me and I had to stop working and I had to work with her to get the job done,” Compton said, not that frustrating tech issues aren’t strange with distance learning.
At Galvin Middle School in Wakefield, Massachusetts, a suburb north of Boston, teachers sent students paper and pen assignments if there were internet problems, said Trish Dellanno, who arrived at the school by phone. . “Teachers have been able to keep moving. They will go to the old school.”
The outage affected ISPs and the cloud, as well as major sites like Google and Facebook. Amazon, whose web services division offers a wide range of online services, indicated that its network was not the cause of the problem and that the connectivity issues of its Amazon Web Services customers were resolved toward at 12:45 p.m., after an hour and a half. Google said it had also found no problems with its own services and was investigating.
East Coast interruptions began at 11:25 a.m. local time, and recovery began at 12:37 p.m., according to Doug Madory, director of Internet analytics at Kentik, a network control company. Verizon reported a 12% drop in traffic volume.
Madory said she still did not know if other companies were affected. Comcast, another major Internet service provider, said it had not noticed any problems with its network on Tuesday. AT&T said it does not supply home internet in the Northeast and that customers were not affected.
Cary Wiedemann, a network engineer who had connectivity issues at home in northern Virginia, said some online services could have been disrupted even if home Internet still worked, if the problem was the backbone of the Verizon Network
“If Outlook works but YouTube doesn’t, whose fault is it? Verizon’s fault. But that’s not obvious from the start,” he said.
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This story has been revised to correct the spelling of network control company Kentik. It has also been updated to correct the name of the Verizon spokesperson. It’s Rich Young, not Jim Greer.
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