Did your Verizon service go out Monday? Well, you’re not the only one.
A widespread outage affecting Verizon customers as well as thousands of websites serviced by Cloudfare in the Northeast hit at about 7 a.m.
The problem that caused it all can be traced to a small commercial internet service provider in Pittsburgh, DQE Communications, according to the online magazine Slate. It reportedly sent out a mistaken signal.
But that was only part of the issue. The problem was compounded by Verizon, which passed along the incorrect routes, Slate reported.
“The really big problem is that Verizon, as a large company, could have actually said ‘this doesn’t look right, we won’t pass it on.’ But they didn’t,” Cloudfare CTO John Graham-Cumming told Slate. “They let it go out into the wider world, which affected a large number of folks.”
Verizon told Slate in a statement, “There was an intermittent disruption in internet service for some customers this morning. Our engineers resolved the issue by 9 a.m. ET. We are currently investigating the issue.”
Most of the downed services were back online by 10 a.m..
A call to DQE for comment was not immediately returned. Slate reported that a company spokesperson said in a statement that officials “immediately examined the issue and adjusted our routing policy.”
