Verizon Communications (VZ  ) has had a rough week at the market after a Fios outage caused large swaths of the East Coast to lose access to various web services. Verizon's stock has been down since the incident, potentially showing some signs of slowing and recovering as the week reaches its close.

Tuesday afternoon was a rocky afternoon for many internet users across the United States. For many users (myself among them, the outage interrupting work on an article published earlier this week), services such as Google (GOOGL  ) and some streaming services such as Hulu (parent company Disney, (DIS  )), and even internet services such as Amazon's (AMZN  ) Amazon Web Services were slowed down or inaccessible. It wouldn't be until later that evening when things started to return to normal, but the brief outage's widespread effects were too much for Verizon to contain.

The outage effects were amplified by the Coronavirus pandemic, which has forced millions in the United States to work and learn from home. Many users reported difficulty using teleconferencing apps for virtual learning and remote work. Popular teleconferencing app Zoom (ZM  ) experienced problems, as well as Google Meet and Google Classroom, which wrought havoc at many companies and schools as the afternoon progressed.

Verizon would later go on to blame a cut cable in Brooklyn for the outage, though there's some degree of speculation as to the veracity of those claims. Lisa Pierce, vice president of research at Gartner Inc (IT  ), speculated that there might be more than Verizon was letting on. "It doesn't make any sense that it would cause this big a ripple," she told the Washington Post. Verizon hasn't been particularly talkative about the incident in the days since the disaster, leaving plenty of room for continuing speculation. At the very least, however, whatever did go wrong appears to have been fixed.

Looking at charts of Verizon's performance over the last week makes it immediately evident that investors were pretty spooked by the outage, with the company taking a decent hit in share price over the last few days. Shares dropped 3.2% on Tuesday, sliding from Monday's close of $58.42 to $56.55. The trend continued into Wednesday, where Verizon lost an additional 2.5% after ending the day at $55.13. The trend seems to have slowed down on Thursday; Verizon shares ended the day 0.44% up, but slid a bit in after-hours trading to end up just below Wednesday's close. It might take a bit longer for Verizon to recover than if this outage had occurred before the pandemic, due to the sheer weight of the outage being felt by so many users at once.