“We are aware of an issue impacting the quality of Fios service throughout the Northeast corridor,” said Rich Young, spokesman for Verizon. “Our network team is fully engaged. We are working through the root cause and have already seen service levels start to restore.”
The US Federal Communications Commission said it was investigating the outage.
Fiber cuts can happen for a number of reasons, including accidents during construction, fires or utility problems. It’s not clear what the cause of Tuesday’s fiber cut was.
Internet service companies typically have multiple redundancies built into their network, so when customers lose access to part of the network, other locations will make up for the loss. But the extra, rerouted traffic can make internet speeds slower — particularly when traffic is high, such as when millions of people are working from home.
— CNN’s Brian Fung contributed to this report
