#Is Verizon Fios down? Internet outage spanning Northeastern US

Verizon Fios customers across the Northeast suffered from slow and spotty 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 webpages and experienced slow upload and download speeds,  according to outage-tracking website Downdetector.com.

The problems started emerging around 11:30 a.m. and persisted into the early afternoon, Downdetector reports show. 

Verizon customers complained about the issues on Twitter, where the telecom giant said they had been fixed by about 3 p.m. 

“An internet issue impacting the quality of our Fios service throughout the Northeast has been resolved. Network performance and service levels are returning to normal,” Verizon tweeted.

Verizon also said it was working to fix a cut fiber cable in Brooklyn that affected a “small number” of local Fios customers. It’s not clear whether that was the cause of the larger regional problems.

Users also reported outages for a wide range of major internet services around the same time as Verizon, including Zoom, Gmail, Microsoft Office 365 and Amazon Web Services, according to Downdetector.

Those services have become crucial to people working from home and students who are attending school remotely because of the coronavirus pandemic. 

It’s unclear whether those reported outages were related to the Verizon problems.

Amazon Web Services said some East Coast customers experienced “connectivity issues” with an internet service provider from 11:26 a.m. to 12:46 p.m., but AWS’ own services were operating normally.

A Verizon spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.