Cloud outages continue to dominate internet disruptions in mid-December

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 31% to 308 in the week of Dec. 11, down from a recent high of 444 in the prior week, according to data from ThousandEyes, a network-monitoring service owned by Cisco Systems Inc.

U.S. disruptions fell 39% week over week to 107, comprising 35% of all global interruptions. Notably, cloud-based platforms continued to account for some of the most significant disruptions in December, following an hours-long Amazon Web Services Inc. outage that impacted thousands of global customers Dec. 7.

ThousandEyes detected two notable cloud-based disruptions Dec. 15. A daytime outage at AWS impacted the reachability of multiple applications. Network congestion between parts of the Amazon.com Inc. unit's backbone and some internet providers caused the disruption, which apparently centered on two U.S. cloud regions. The 45-minute outage was cleared at about 11 a.m. ET.

Later that day, users of Microsoft Corp.'s Azure Active Directory service dealt with a disruption that ran for about 1.5 hours. With authentication requests returning service errors, the U.S. tech company extended its network to redundant infrastructure, restoring the affected service around 9:25 p.m. ET.

A total of 11 collaboration-app disruptions were also observed last week, down from 12 in the prior week. Five of the outages occurred in the U.S.

Global business-hours outages slightly increased to 34% of the total for the week of Dec. 11. The metric in the U.S. rose 11 percentage points to 36%, while in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, business-hours disruptions were up by 12 percentage points to 36%. Business-hours outages in the Asia-Pacific region decreased by 12 percentage points to 32% of the worldwide total.