Verizon glitch briefly cuts off NYC from the net

Verizon DSL and FIOS customers in New York City found themselves cut off from the net Friday afternoon after a router situated between its network and the Internet failed. Despite their assurances that things are back to normal, many Verizon customers are reporting that they are still experiencing issues accessing certain websites.

The outage occurred around 3:15pm. By 4:30 they made an announcement acknowledging the problem and saying they were working on it, and announced it was resolved a short time later. To their credit they did post updates regarding the outage to their Twitter feed. However, you were affected you couldn’t access it so it really didn’t do much good.

Some small business customers are also complaining of server timeouts and other access issues. I happen to be in NYC and I was affected by the outage. For several hours I was unable to access most sites, getting time out or “connection interrupted” messages via my Verizon DSL connection. Fortunately I have a mobile broadband card from Sprint that allowed me to access the web normally.

I’m no longer having problems here, but for those who are, here’s a tip. If you haven’t yet, reboot your computer and at the same time, unplug your router/modem. Wait about 30 seconds and plug back in. This power cycling seems to help, at least it did for us. If you’ve been affected by this outage leave us a comment and tell us about it!
Read [PCWorld]