Global internet outages jump in third week of May

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 grew by 28% week over week to 370 in the week of May 15, hitting a high mark not seen since early March, according to data from ThousandEyes, a network-monitoring service owned by Cisco Systems Inc.

The jump was driven in part by U.S. outages, which increased 48% week over week to 196 from 132. The U.S. accounted for 53% of all global network disruptions during the week of May 15, up from 46% in the prior week.

Among the week's most notable outages was a May 20 interruption to Slack Technologies Inc.'s business communications platform, which impacted users of its messaging services. Slack said the outage was due to a code change that it was able to revert, eventually restoring the affected services. The disruption lasted approximately 25 minutes before it was cleared at about 1:55 p.m. ET.

A day earlier, on May 19, U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange platform Coinbase Global Inc. experienced a disruption that affected global access to its site and application. The interruption began with initial requests timing out before leading to a system congestion. The outage, which lasted about two hours, was cleared around 10:45 a.m. ET.

ThousandEyes also observed a disruption May 17 that impacted users of network transit provider Hurricane Electric LLC in the U.S., the U.K., and eight other countries and territories. The outage, which affected nodes in San Francisco and San Jose, Calif., was divided into three occurrences over a one-and-a-half-hour period. It was cleared at about 3:25 p.m. ET.

Global outages among collaboration apps overall rose 25% to five during the week of May 15, the third consecutive weekly increase. The U.S. accounted for three of those outages, up from one in the prior week.

Business-hours network disruptions comprised 44% of the total global outages during the week, up 10 percentage points. In the U.S., business-hours disruptions rose 3 percentage points to 38% of the country's total.

In Europe, the Middle East and Africa, 51% of the global outages occurred during business hours, up 14 percentage points week over week, in the first time since March that the proportion of business-hours outages in the region was bigger than those outside of business hours. In the Asia-Pacific region, business-hours outages rose 19 percentage points to 49%.