8 Mar, 2021
Global internet outages decline in early March
By Anser Haider
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 declined 12% in the first week of March compared to the prior week, according to data from ThousandEyes, a network-monitoring service owned by Cisco Systems Inc.
Outages in the week ended March 5 totaled 392, compared to 443 in the previous week. U.S. outages in the same week dropped to 171 from 204, a 16% decrease compared to the previous week. In total, U.S. outages accounted for 44% of all global outages, down from 46% in the previous week.
Verizon Communications Inc.'s Verizon Business unit experienced an outage on March 3 that impacted its peers and customers, including Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Zoom Video Communications Inc. The outage was first observed around 9 a.m. ET and lasted about 36 minutes, though some of those were spread out over a 75-minute period.
Also on March 3, Hong-Kong-based internet service provider PCCW experienced an outage that impacted some of its U.S. customers and networks, including Target Corp., Morgan Stanley and Dell Technologies Inc. The outage, which was first observed around 8:45 a.m. ET, lasted around 31 minutes and was divided into three periods over an hour and 20 minute span.
Global outages among collaboration apps during the week doubled to six from three in the previous week. Four of those outages occurred in the U.S., marking the second time this year there were more than two collaboration app network outages for the U.S. in a single week.
Forty-five percent of internet outages in the first week of March occurred within business hours, up from 43% in the prior week. The U.S. also experienced 45% of all outages within business hours, up 2% from the previous week. In Europe, the Middle East and Africa, 36% of all outages were within business hours, while the same metric in Asia-Pacific was 54%.
