Global internet outages fall 24% in 1st week of August

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.

A total of 245 internet outages occurred globally in the week of July 31 to Aug. 6, a 24% decrease from the 323 outages recorded in the week of July 24, according to data from ThousandEyes, a network-monitoring service owned by Cisco Systems Inc.

The outages for the week of July 24 were a marked increase from the 276 disruptions recorded in the week of July 17.

U.S. outages also decreased 54% to 76 in the July 31 week, from the prior week's total of 167. The U.S. total comprised 31% of all global outages for the week of July 31, or 20 percentage points lower than the 51% in the prior week.

ThousandEyes observed two notable outages in the previous week.

An Aug. 3 disruption to Microsoft Corp.'s network affected some downstream partners and access to services running on Microsoft platforms. The outage, potentially a maintenance exercise, lasted 29 minutes and was cleared at about 2:45 a.m. ET. The interruption appeared to center on nodes in Des Moines, Iowa; Chicago; Cleveland, Ohio; and Portland, Ore.

Three days later, on Aug. 6, network transit provider Hurricane Electric LLC suffered an interruption that ran for 55 minutes across two occurrences and was cleared about 2:15 a.m. ET. The outage, longer in terms of total length than a previous network disruption July 21, impacted customers and downstream partners in the U.S. and 10 other countries. The latest outage centered on nodes in New York; Los Angeles; Ashburn, Va.; Atlanta; Paris; and San Jose, Calif.

For the July 31 week, ThousandEyes detected only one collaboration-app outage compared to four in the prior week, marking a return to levels last seen in early February. No collaboration-app outage occurred in the U.S.

Business-hours outages for the week of July 31 had a proportion of 38%, up 3 percentage points from the previous week. In the U.S., 28% of all outages occurred within business hours, down 8 percentage points from prior-week figures. Europe, the Middle East and Africa had an increase of 11 percentage points in business-hours outages to 43%, while such disruptions in the Asia-Pacific region were up 7 percentage points to 44%. All regions, however, registered a lower proportion of outages during business hours compared to those outside business hours.