Verizon Outage Hits East Coast As Users Begin Work

Verizon users across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic began experiencing internet issues or outages on Wednesday morning.

Service provider giant Verizon experienced an internet outage on Wednesday morning, right as the East Coast began signing on to telework or distance-learn.

Reports of internet connectivity issues began rolling in a little after 8 a.m. ET on Wednesday. The Verizon outage, according to Downdetector.com, impacted parts of Washington D.C. and several states, including Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

A Verizon spokesman told CRN that there was an “issue impacting internet routing for some of our customers. The issue has since been resolved.”

At 9:53 a.m. ET, Downdetector.com received nearly 5,000 reports of service disruptions. By around noon, the website reported 467 reports of service issues related to Verizon.

Verizon users across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states took to Twitter on Wednesday to report moderate to critical service disruptions, with many users complaining about spotty connections or complete outages, especially as it related to VPN connectivity.

Basking Ridge, N.J.-based Verizon did not respond to CRN’s request for information on the outage by publication time.

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On Twitter, the carrier’s Verizon Support account was directing users experiencing issues to send direct messages to the company for further assistance, but had not posted any further information regarding the outage or its cause on its Support or Service Outage Information webpages as of publication time.

A little after 10 a.m. ET, Harvard University Information Technology posted to its service status page that it was monitoring an incident impacting Verizon network services. “Users may experience network or VPN connection issues due to a Verizon global issue affecting the east cost of the U.S.” the update said.

Verizon internet services in January suffered a massive outage in the same geographic location. The carrier said at the time that the service disruption was due to a fiber cut in Brooklyn. The company later reportedly said that the broader outage was caused by a software issue unrelated to the fiber cut.