Global internet outages continue to grow through mid-July

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% during the week of July 10, to 360, marking the third consecutive week of gains, according to data from ThousandEyes, a network-monitoring service owned by Cisco Systems Inc.

U.S. outages rose even more week over week, up 51% to 178 disruptions. The U.S. total comprised 49% of all global outages for the week of July 10, up from 42% the week prior.

Among the most notable disruptions was a July 12 outage at Amazon.com Inc. that impacted some of its downstream partners and customers in the U.S. and 12 other countries. The outage ran for about 43 minutes across five occurrences over a five-hour period. It was finally cleared at about 9:05 a.m. ET. The interruption centered on nodes in Tokyo; Columbus, Ohio; Montreal; and São Paulo.

Several hours later, a network disruption impacted customers of telecom carrier AT&T Inc. in 11 countries, including the U.S. The AT&T outage centered on nodes in Phoenix and lasted 14 minutes before it was cleared about 3:55 p.m. ET.

There were five global outages in collaboration apps during the week of July 10, up from four in the week prior. Two of the disruptions occurred in the U.S., up from one in the previous week.

Global business-hours disruptions rose 5 percentage points week over week, to 40% of total outages. This upward trend was reflected across all regions, with the business-hours disruptions in the U.S. increasing by 3 percentage points to 37% of the country's total. Those for Europe, the Middle East and Africa gained by 3 percentage points to 41%. In the Asia-Pacific region, the disruptions grew by 10 percentage points to 44% of the total outages.