23 Aug, 2021
Global internet outages increase 10% in 3rd week of August
By Mark Anthony Gubagaras
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.
The number of global internet outages increased by 10% in the week of Aug. 14, to 317 from 287 in the preceding week, according to data from ThousandEyes, a network-monitoring service owned by Cisco Systems Inc.
However, U.S. outages dipped 6% to 102 from 108 disruptions in the prior week. The U.S. total comprised 32% of the global outages for the Aug. 14 week, a proportion lower than 38% in the week before.
ThousandEyes detected two notable outages in the previous week, both occurring Aug. 18.
U.S. managed cloud computing provider Rackspace Technology Inc. experienced an outage that impacted some partners and customers in multiple countries, including the U.S., Canada, Germany and Switzerland. The interruption, which apparently centered on nodes in Washington, D.C., ran for about 30 minutes across six occurrences over a period of 1 hour, 15 minutes. The outage was cleared at around 5:15 a.m. ET.
Later on the day, a network interruption at NTT Global unit and internet service provider NTT America Inc. affected some customers and downstream partners in the U.S. and Canada. The outage, which appeared to center on nodes in Seattle and lasted six minutes across two occurrences over a 15-minute period, was cleared at around 6:15 p.m. ET.
There were four collaboration-app outages in the Aug. 14 week, down from one in the prior week. Three of these disruptions occurred in the U.S.
Business-hours internet outages comprised 38% of the global total during the Aug. 7 week, up 3 percentage points from the prior week. However, the same metric in the U.S. fell 4 percentage points week over week to 29%. Business-hour disruptions in Europe, the Middle East and Africa increased 14 percentage points to 49%, while such disruptions in the Asia-Pacific region rose 3 percentage points to 40%.
