Internet outages spike in last week of February

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 last week of February saw the volume of global internet outages jump 52% over the prior week, according to data from ThousandEyes, a network-monitoring service owned by Cisco Systems Inc.

Outages in the week ended Feb. 26 totaled 443, compared to 291 in the previous week. This marked the highest number of outages for a single week recorded by ThousandEyes in 2021. U.S. outages in the week rose 57% to 204 from 130 in the prior week and accounting for 46% of all global outages, up from 44%.

On Feb. 23, Microsoft's LinkedIn experienced a service disruption at around 1:50 p.m. ET that impacted its mobile and desktop global user base. The total disruption lasted around two hours and access to the service was restored around 3:40 p.m. ET.

The following day, Comcast Corp.'s Comcast Communications LLC experienced an outage at around 11:00 p.m. ET that impacted a number of peers and customers in the U.S., Canada and the Netherlands. Ten minutes into the outage, the radius of the disruption expanded to a larger number of Comcast nodes in the U.S., impacting customers in more countries including the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada and France. The outage lasted around 14 minutes in total and was cleared around 11:15 p.m. ET.

ThousandEyes also observed an outage on Feb. 25 that impacted network transit provider Hurricane Electric LLC's users across multiple countries including the U.S., U.K., Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, Germany, Canada, Japan, Spain and Brazil. The outage, lasting around 36 minutes over a 45 minute period, impacted access to customer networks including Credit Suisse Group AG, The Procter & Gamble Co. and Bank of America Corp.

Global outages among collaboration apps during the week dropped to three, down 40% from five in the previous week. None of those outages occurred in the U.S., compared to two in the previous week.

Meanwhile, 43% of internet outages in the last week of February occurred within business hours, consistent with the same amount in the prior week. However, U.S. outages during business hours totaled 43%, a 4% increase from the previous week. In Europe, the Middle East and Africa, 29% of all outages were within business hours, while the same metric in Asia-Pacific was 50%.