Internet Outages Frustrate East Coast As Verizon Blames "Cut Cable" In Brooklyn
Jan. 26, 2021, 12:47 p.m.
This time it seems you can't blame Spectrum.
An untold number of Verizon Internet customers trying to work or go to school or connect to the vital flow of information that is necessary for life in this century have been thwarted by an outage on Tuesday morning.
The Verizon customer service account has acknowledged that there is a "cut cable" in Brooklyn causing problems, but the outage appears to be spread across the east coast, as customers from Boston to Pittsburgh to D.C. have been tweeting their issues at the telecom company.
There is a fiber cut in Brooklyn. We have no ETR, as of yet. You can use the MY Fios app for updates. *EAG
— Verizon Support (@VerizonSupport) January 26, 2021
I’m on FiOS in Boston and speedtesting fine to the local Comcast server, but think there is something wrong across the backbone because I’m in an awful Teams meeting right now.
— Matt Zagaja (@mzagaja) January 26, 2021
Is @verizonfios internet OK in the Pittsburgh area? I am having trouble connecting to everything. And friends and coworkers are reporting the same issues around the area.
— b😷bby (@GoBobbo) January 26, 2021
Yo @VerizonSupport - any Fios issues in the DC metro area now?
— Carencey (@carencey) January 26, 2021
Virginia's state senate appears to have been one of the affected parties, though it looks like their internet came back online around 1:30 p.m.
Oh this is fun. The internet is down at the Science Museum, where the Senate was supposed to start 15 minutes ago. They could proceed by calling everyone's names for all the votes. But there wouldn't be a livestream for the public to watch. So now we wait.
— Amy Friedenberger (@AJFriedenberger) January 26, 2021
Reps from Verizon have not responded to our request for comment. A spokesperson from Charter/Spectrum dryly noted that it has been a "quiet day" for them.
While users of Zoom, Amazon, and G-Suite products have also reported outages today, it's unclear if they are related to Verizon's issues. A rep from Amazon pointed out that the company's dashboard is reporting the issue as external. "We are aware of reports regarding issues affecting access to some Google products, but have not found issues with our services. We're continuing to investigate," a Google spokesperson wrote in an email.
As we reported this fall, Verizon has a fraught relationship with New York City. Mayor Michael Bloomberg signed a deal with the company in 2008, which promised to bring Fios service to “each and every borough, neighborhood, boulevard, avenue and street” in the city by 2014. But the franchise agreement itself only required Verizon to “pass” every building with Fios cable, not run the actual wires to people’s homes. In 2017, the city sued Verizon to force the company to actually offer their service to New Yorkers per the agreement. That lawsuit was settled this past November, and Verizon agreed to expand to another 500,000 households, with priority given to 125,000 homes in low-income neighborhoods.
We'll update this post as we learn more.
[UPDATE / 5:44 p.m.] Verizon rep Christopher Serico, just sent us this statement: "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. We are working to identify the root cause."