Millions of people in the US East Coast reported outage in Verizon Fios internet on Tuesday. According to Down Detector, the reports started coming from early morning (local time). The heat map of the United States posted on the website showed users reporting issues in Boston, New York and Washington. The area covers an area of almost 300 miles or 500 kilometres from Philadelphia and Pennsylvania to Richmond and Virginia. Verizon's wireless network is one of the largest in the United States, covering 70 per cent of the country with its LTE network. The company later said in a statement that the disruption remained for a "short period of time".
Several users started posting about the outage on X (formerly Twitter).
"Verizon has all of us night owls and insomniacs in a tizzy because there's an apparent outage, nationwide. It's definitely here in DC, MD, and I believe Virginia," commented one user. "This Verizon internet outage seems unusual. Annoying also," said another.
"Huge internet outage for Verizon happening overnight. It's already been out over two hours," said a third user.
Responding to one of the users, Verizon said, "There is either an outage or network maintenance impacting your area. We don't have full details just yet. Our apologies for any inconvenience this is causing. We're trying to get all the information from our network team so we can provide you all an update."
Later in the evening, a Verizon spokesperson said in a statement to NDTV, "A network issue early this morning disrupted service for some Verizon Fios customers in the Northeast for a short period of time. As soon as the issue was identified, our engineering teams quickly restored the service."
Reports of the outages spiked between midnight and 2 am EST, with the network receiving thousands of complaints during this time, according to Down Detector.
Ninety per cent of these complaints relate to the internet services, nine per cent were described as "total blackout" while one per cent affected TV streaming.
Verizon Fios is a fiber-optic internet, TV, and phone service provided by the company.
