Verizon Outage Compounds Zoom, Gmail Issues Across Northeast

An outage on the Verizon network caused issues for teleworkers and students across the Northeast on Tuesday, as other cloud and service providers also confirmed outages at the same time.

Verizon said a fiber cut in Brooklyn was to blame for a massive outage Tuesday that affected thousands of customers in the northeastern U.S. — at the same time that services such as Google and Zoom appeared to suffer issues as well.

The telecommunications giant’s customers across Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington D.C. saw their internet services slowed or stopped completely due to a cut fiber line in New York, according to the Basking Ridge, N.J.-based carrier.

“There is a fiber cut in Brooklyn. We have no [estimated time of repair] ETR, as of yet,” Verizon Support said in a Tweet on Tuesday morning.

According to DownDetector, which tracks internetr outages, there were more than 22,000 reports of outages at around at 12:14 pm ET. That numbers dropped to more than 3,200 at 1:30 pm ET.

A spokesperson from Verizon confirmed that the carrier was “looking into” the issue when asked for clarification from CRN on the outage.

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At the same time, Zoom Video Communications, Google Gmail, and several financial websites also reported an increase in outages on Tuesday morning. Amazon Web Services too said it was investigating connectivity issues with an external internet provider, or a third-party network on Tuesday.

It is unclear whether Verizon‘s outage is directly linked to the other outages, but the connectivity issues are occurring in the same area as the Verizon outage.

Verizon on Tuesday morning announced is fiscal fourth-quarter 2020 earnings, with operating revenue of $34.69 billion, down slightly by 0.2 percent year over year. The carrier‘s Global Enterprise Solutions, which includes small and midsize business, public sector and wholesale businesses, also dipped by 0.3 percent to $8.05 billion during the fourth quarter of 2020.