Global internet outages continue to rise in 3rd week of 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 number of global internet outages continued to increase during the week of April 17, marking the second consecutive week of growing outages following a low point for the year to date in early April, according to data from ThousandEyes, a network-monitoring service owned by Cisco Systems Inc.

Global outages for the just-ended week rose 13%, to 294 from 260 in the previous week. U.S. outages increased 34% week over week, to 146 from 109. The total number of U.S. outages comprised 50% of all global outages in the last week, higher than the 42% reported in the prior week.

On April 20, U.S. cloud service provider Internap Holdings encountered an outage that centered on nodes in New York. The outage, which impacted customers and downstream partners in the U.S. and six other countries, was first observed around 11:10 p.m. ET and lasted 18 minutes before it was cleared.

ThousandEyes also observed an outage on April 21 that affected some of Zayo Group Holdings Inc.'s customers and partners in the U.S., China, Hong Kong, and seven other countries. The interruption lasted about 24 minutes over a one-hour period and was cleared around 12:40 p.m. ET. The outage apparently centered initially on nodes in Atlanta, Salt Lake City, and Denver, before expanding to nodes in Toronto, Canada, which was the peak of the interruption. Further occurrences of the outage centered on nodes in San Francisco and Phoenix, with the latter being the interruption's longest period.

Global outages among collaboration apps during the week fell 20%, to four outages from five in the week prior, marking the first time since early March that collaboration app outages decreased for two weeks in a row. Three of those outages occurred in the U.S., the same level as in the previous week.

Business-hours outages globally represented 43% of total disruptions, the same as the previous week. Business-hours outages ticked up 6% week over week in the U.S., however, to 45% of the total.

Europe, the Middle East and Africa also recorded an increase in business-hours outages last week, at 46% of the region's total outages, an increase of 2% from the week prior. In the Asia-Pacific region, business-hours outages accounted for 38% of total disruptions, a 9% decrease from the previous week.