Hundreds of state workers lost a day of work on Sept. 21 when a Verizon outage cut phone and Internet service to their New York City offices.

Staffers at the departments of Motor Vehicles , Housing and Community Renewal, and Taxation and Finance, plus the State Liquor Authority played games on their phones, sources said.

State Office of Information Technology Services spokeswoman Angela Liotta said workers “remained productive” during the outage, which Verizon blamed on an electrical short.