Global internet outages continue to drop in early April

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 week of April 3 marked the sixth consecutive weekly drop in the number of global internet outages, following a peak in late February, according to data from ThousandEyes, a network-monitoring service owned by Cisco Systems Inc.

Global outages decreased 9% to 224 from 247 in the prior week, while U.S. outages also fell 9% to 97 from 107. In total, U.S. outages retained the earlier week's proportion of total global outages at 43%.

On April 8, internet service provider and NTT Global unit NTT America Inc. experienced an outage that affected some customers and downstream partners in the U.S. and 10 other countries. The interruption, which apparently centered on nodes in Newark, N.J., and Paris, France, was first observed about 2:35 a.m. ET and lasted around 34 minutes.

ThousandEyes also observed an outage on April 6 that impacted AT&T Inc. customers in countries including the U.S., the U.K., Japan, Germany, Canada, Australia, India, Brazil, South Korea, Switzerland and the Netherlands. The outage, which lasted 24 minutes was cleared around 10:25 p.m. ET, centered on nodes in Phoenix, Ariz.

Global outages among collaboration apps during the week rose 57%, to 11 outages from the previous week's total of seven. One of these outages was observed in the U.S.

Meanwhile, 45% of the network outages last week happened within business hours, an 11% increase from the week prior. In the U.S., 52% of the outages were within business hours, up 21%. This marks the first time in 2021 that the proportion of business-hour outages in the U.S. was bigger than the percentage of outages outside business hours.

In Europe, the Middle East and Africa, 33% of all outages were within business hours, down 3%, making it the only region to record fewer business-hour interruptions. The same metric in Asia-Pacific was 48%, a 14% increase from the previous week.