Widespread internet outages hit Northeast

Internet users across the Northeast reported widespread outages Tuesday.

In an emailed statement 90 minutes after the outage was first reported, Verizon said it was working on the problem hurting Fios service “throughout the Northeast corridor” and that some service had already been restored.

The telecom giant had reported a cut fiber in the New York borough of Brooklyn via Twitter, although it’s not clear if that issue was responsible for the outage. Verizon didn’t give any estimate in its email about when the problem would be fixed and didn’t reply to questions about what caused the problem.

Comcast, another major internet service provider, said it had not observed problems with its network Tuesday.

People posting on Twitter reported having issues connecting with various online services in a geographic area stretching from Washington to Boston. That densely populated region includes key government services as well as financial companies.

The outage affected internet and cloud providers as well as major sites such as Google and Facebook.

Amazon, whose web services division powers a wide ranges of online services, indicated its network wasn’t the cause of the problem.

It said that for about 90 minutes, ending at around 12:45 p.m. EST, some customers on the East Coast had problems connecting to Amazon Web Services, or AWS. It said its services were operating normally.

The East Coast outages began at 11:25 a.m. EST and recovery began at 12:37 p.m, according to Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik, a network monitoring company. He reported a 12% drop in traffic volume to Verizon.