Internet outages continue to decrease in late October

This weekly feature from S&P Global Market Intelligence, in collaboration with internet-service monitoring company ThousandEyes, aims to give remote workers insights into internet service disruptions.

Global internet outages dropped 12% in the week of Oct. 23, to 350 from 391 in the preceding week, according to data from ThousandEyes, a network-monitoring service owned by Cisco Systems Inc.

The latest figure marks a return to internet disruption levels last seen earlier in the month.

U.S. disruptions, meanwhile, dipped 6% to 166 from 177 in the prior week. The U.S. total comprised 47% of the total global outages for the Oct. 23 week, which is slightly higher than 45% in the previous week.

ThousandEyes detected two notable outages last week.

California-based network transit provider Hurricane Electric LLC, which dealt with a disruption more than a week ago, experienced a bigger outage on Oct. 27 that affected customers and downstream partners in the U.S., the U.K., and 10 other countries. The interruption, which centered on nodes in New York and Chicago, ran for about 40 minutes across eight occurrences within a period of two hours and 10 minutes. The outage was cleared at about 11:40 p.m. ET.

Two days earlier, on Oct. 25, U.S. managed cloud-computing company Rackspace Technology Inc. suffered an interruption that impacted some partners and customers in the U.S., Hong Kong, and 10 other countries. The disruption, which appeared to center on nodes in Chicago, lasted about 28 minutes before clearing at about 11:15 a.m. ET.

ThousandEyes also observed only one collaboration-app outage in the Oct. 23 week, similar to the prior week. This is the third consecutive weekly instance and the sixth time in 2021 that such a single disruption occurred in the U.S.

Global business-hours outages nudged up 3 percentage points to 43% in the previous week, with the same metric in the U.S. increasing 7 percentage points to 45%. In Europe, the Middle East and Africa, business-hours outages dipped 4 percentage points to 31%, while such outages in the Asia-Pacific region also decreased 4 percentage points to 44%.