Global internet outages continue to decline in late March

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.

The number of global internet outages continued to trend downward in the week of March 20, marking the fourth consecutive weekly drop compared to a peak in late February, according to data from ThousandEyes, a network-monitoring service owned by Cisco Systems Inc.

Global outages decreased to 340 from 354 in the prior week, while U.S. outages dropped 14% to 155 from 180. In total, U.S. outages accounted for 46% of all global outages, compared to 51% a week earlier.

On March 23, Level 3 Communications, the U.S.-based Tier 1 carrier owned by Lumen Technologies Inc., experienced an outage that impacted multiple downstream partners and customers in countries including the U.S., Malaysia, the U.K., Netherlands, Brazil, India, the Czech Republic, Canada, France, Japan and Australia. The outage was first observed around 11:30 a.m. ET and was completely cleared in about 18 minutes.

ThousandEyes also observed an outage on March 24 that impacted some of the partners and customers of communications infrastructure provider Zayo Group LLC. The outage lasted around 24 minutes and was cleared around 3:00 p.m. ET.

Global outages among collaboration apps during the week rose to seven, up 250% from two in the previous week. Three of these outages were observed in the U.S., marking the fourth time this year where there have been three or more collaboration application network outages for the U.S. in a single week.

Meanwhile, 46% of internet outages in the week occurred within business hours, up 7% compared to the prior week. In Europe, the Middle East and Africa, 57% of all outages were within business hours, while the same metric in Asia-Pacific was 51%. In the U.S., however, 36% of outages were within local business hours, a 3% decrease from the previous week.