RHODE ISLAND—A huge outage is affecting thousands of Cox customers throughout a portion of the Northeast including Rhode Island and Massachusetts, causing police and fire department phone numbers to stop working and disrupting internet communications.

Residential and business customers across the area are reporting problems including inoperable phones, internet dropouts and other connection issues. At the Coventry Police Department, police said their lines were down at around 4 p.m. The town's 911 system is working, however. The same was true in Portsmouth, according to the Fire Department.

At Riverside Pediatrics in East Providence, patients are unable to get through by telephone. The medical office notified patients on its Facebook page that "due to a Cox system outage we are unable to receive calls" and recommended people reach them through a patient portal. Other reports continued to stream online as of 8:18 p.m.

The outage was reportedly based on service disruptions on the network run by Level 3 Communications, a large global internet backbone provider that carries voice and internet traffic for large internet service providers and business customers. In a statement, the company said that the disruptions are affecting customers with operations in the Northeastern United States and "our technicians are working to address the issue.

"Ensuring the reliability of our network and communications services is our primary concern," the company said in a statement. "We are dedicated to minimizing impact to our customers and to providing you with updates on our progress as we work to resolve this issue." Some Rhode Island Cox internet customers took to Twitter, reporting that some sites are working, others not. "At least Twitter is," Tweeted Jeanine Calkin. Some customers reported trying to reach customer service only to get a recorded message indicating there is an "area outage."