Tuesday morning, the north-eastern part of the U.S. lies in relative silence just before a massive amount of complaints. “Outage” is the word that comes not only from users, but even from big internet service providers and bandwidth companies such as Verizon and MetroNet Internet.
Even now, three days later, there are reports of internet outage by Verizon users along the eastern coast.
“We are issuing a warning to businesses that there is a major internet outage being reported across the United States today.” stated Intelice Solutions, an internet advisory firm.
By 2 p.m. numerous service providers reported going back to normal, and by 4 p.m. most services showed near-normal access and functionality as reported by DownDetector.com (A real-time outage and problem monitoring webpage that works through user issued reports), which also shows that outage problems started appearing this Monday night, with 30 reports issued early on Tuesday.
Most outage reports began this Tuesday around 11:30 a.m. by users, and numerous companies and service providers joined later. Services such as Zoom, Slack, Pokemon Go, and companies such as Amazon and Epic Corp (owner of EpicGames, publisher of Fortnite) reported connectivity issues as well.
Only 90 minutes after the massive outage, Verizon released a statement via e-mail, explaining to its users that they were working on this problem, which was hurting the optic fiber service throughout the “Northeast corridor”, but that some service had already been restored.
Besides Verizon, other major outlets such as AT&T and Comcast called this an “external network issue”. Verizon reported an optic fiber cut in Brooklyn, but it is not known whether this was the main cause of the outage or not.
Connectivity issues and network problems are annoying for everyone, but being in the middle of the pandemic, where about 41.8% of the US population work from home (according to Upwork), the impact of a day without access to the web or internet services can have a huge impact on the country’s economy.
This outage comes in a very complex time with reddit breaking the stock market investing in Gamestop. While many theorize about the outage being a corporate strategy, until now there has been no evidence to support this claim.
Also, this comes shortly after a hue DDOS attack on DYN that enormously affected the internet for a whole day in October 2020.
Apart from DownDetector, many users reported issues via Twitter. Said reports ranged in a vast area from Washington to Boston, even affecting key U.S. government services and major financial companies and services such as Fidelity Investments.
Even various services offered by Google, the technology and information giant were down. In 2016, Google data centers generated $1.3 billion in economic activity, $750 million in labor income, and 11,000 jobs throughout the United States, so the impact had at these pandemic times, where online services are more important than ever is without a doubt, astounding.
“If Outlook works but YouTube doesn’t, whose fault is it? Verizon’s fault. But that’s not obvious from the onset.” said Cary Wiedemann, a network engineer who had connectivity problems at his home in Northern Virginia. He stated that if the issue was with the backbone of Verizon’s network, some online services could have been disrupted even if your home internet still worked,
At this time, we still have no information issued by Verizon beyond what has been already exposed throughout this post, but we’ll be alert to any statements given by the telecom giant.
Have you experienced the outage? Do you know of any other services that had been affected by this issue? Any implications that you think haven’t been listed in this post? If so, please tell us in the comments!