Global internet outages drop 31% over US holiday week

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 dropped 31% to 252 in the week of May 29, including a sharp drop that occurred over a U.S. holiday, according to data from ThousandEyes, a network-monitoring service owned by Cisco Systems Inc.

U.S. outages fell 59% to 83 in the week that included Memorial Day, down from 201 in the previous week. The U.S. accounted for 33% of all global network disruptions during the week of May 29, compared to 55% in the previous week.

The week's most notable disruptions included a June 2 outage that affected some U.S. customers and networks of Hong Kong-based internet service provider PCCW Ltd. The interruption, which apparently centered on nodes in Ashburn, Va., ran for about 19 minutes before it was cleared at about 3:25 a.m. ET.

A day earlier, on June 1, Microsoft Corp. experienced an outage — likely a maintenance exercise — that impacted some downstream partners and access to Microsoft-based services. The outage, which appeared to center on nodes in Dublin, lasted 29 minutes and was cleared at around 7:15 p.m. ET.

On the same day, ThousandEyes also observed a disruption on the network of Flag Telecom Global Internet, part of global network and services provider Global Cloud Xchange. The outage, which apparently centered on nodes in Singapore and Hong Kong, affected downstream providers and customers in the U.S., Australia and nine other countries and territories. The outage, which ran for about one hour and 51 minutes across a three-hour period, was cleared at around 4:05 a.m. ET.

Overall, global disruptions among collaboration apps dropped 67% to two from six in the prior week. One of these outages occurred in the U.S.

Business-hours outages globally rose 3 percentage points week over week to 40%. In contrast, business-hours outages in the U.S. dropped 9 percentage points to 21% of the country's total.

In Europe, the Middle East and Africa, 39% of the global outages occurred during business hours, a decrease of 9 percentage points from the previous week. Asia-Pacific was the only region that registered an increase in the proportion of business-hours outages at 64%, up 15 percentage points from the prior week and greater than outages observed outside business hours.