Global internet outages up 7% in early 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 increased 7% in the week of July 3, marking a second consecutive week of increases, according to data from ThousandEyes, a network-monitoring service owned by Cisco Systems Inc.

ThousandEyes recorded 282 global outages during the week of July 3, up from 264 in the week prior. U.S. outages jumped 20% week over week to 118, from 98. The U.S. accounted for 42% of all global outages during the week of July 3, up from 37% a week earlier. The global and U.S. totals both remained lower than a recent peak reached in mid-June.

Among the last week's notable outages, the two most significant both occurred July 7. Oracle Corp. first experienced a network disruption affecting customers and downstream partners in the U.S., Japan and other countries interacting with Oracle Cloud services. The interruption, which apparently centered on nodes in Chicago and Washington, D.C., lasted 23 minutes and was cleared about 11:30 a.m. ET.

Hours later, an interruption impacted downstream partners and customers of NTT Global's internet service provider unit NTT America Inc. in the U.S., the U.K. and eight other countries. The outage, which centered on nodes in Tokyo, Los Angeles and Seattle, ran for about 14 minutes before it was cleared at about 1:25 p.m. ET.

The global volume of disruptions affecting collaboration apps fell week over week, to four from eight. Only one of the collaboration app outages occurred in the U.S. during the week of July 3, down from five the previous week.

Globally, business-hours disruptions fell 9 percentage points week over week, to 35% of total outages. The U.S. total for business-hours outages fell 18 percentage points to 34%.

Business-hours outages in the Asia-Pacific region dropped 16 percentage points in the most recent week to 34%. Europe, the Middle East and Africa bucked the trend for business-hours outages, recording a 12-percentage-point increase to 38%.