Verizon Fios internet outage in the Northeast leaves parents and students frustrated

MEDFIELD, Mass. — Now more than ever, we are all depending on the internet. With the massive internet outage today, many children across the state lost out on precious school time. In Medfield, parents and students are fed up because they say they’ve been dealing with poor internet connection for months on end.

“I was surprised. My 8th grader texted me concerned that he couldn’t get onto his Google,” said Tara Oliveto, a parent.

Oliveto’s two children are in the Medfield school district, and getting their remote learning education online is top priority.

“I think he was more worried that he would think he didn’t go into the Zoom,” said Oliveto.

Across the Northeast, Verizon’s internet outage Tuesday afternoon disrupted remote learning and work from home.

It started around noon and cleared up about an hour and a half later.

On Twitter, Verizon Support wrote, “We are aware of a fiber cut in the Brooklyn area.”

“You can’t get on, you’re in the middle of doing some kind of lesson online, and it’s gone,” said another parent.

For one Medfield parent, who didn’t want to be identified, he said the internet has been a problem for Medfield students for months now.

“The Wi-Fi has always been unstable in the schools,” said the parent.

Medfield School Superintendent Jeff Marsden said the internet connection at Blake Middle School and Medfield High School continues to be problematic.

“When you have that focus on technology, you make sure you have fail over protection, backup devices,” said the parent.

Here’s part of a letter that was sent to parents. It reads, “These issues began a week before we ramped up our synchronous learning and our tech team has been working with firewall, access point, and connectivity experts for over a week. We had a new firewall overnighted from California, and it was installed last Friday. The firewall replacement was supposed to solve all of our issues. It clearly did not.”

“Lost classroom time never gets made up,” said the parent.

We reached out to the superintendent for an interview, but have not heard back yet. The letter goes onto say the superintendent himself is beyond frustrated as well, and he is asking for patience.

Cox Media Group