Global internet outages up 30% in 3rd week of September

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 volume of global internet outages increased 30% to 385 in the week of Sept. 18, compared to 297 in the previous week, according to data from ThousandEyes, a network-monitoring service owned by Cisco Systems Inc.

This is the second successive weekly increase in the number of global internet outages, with the figures close to levels last seen in early March.

U.S. outages also increased 50% week over week, to 184 from 123 in the prior week. The U.S. total accounted for 48% of the total global outages for the Sept. 18 week, compared to 41% in the previous week.

ThousandEyes detected two notable disruptions in the past week.

On Sept. 21, U.S. information technology company Oracle Corp. dealt with a network disruption that impacted downstream partners and customers using Oracle Cloud services in the U.S., Germany and five other locations. The outage, which apparently centered on nodes in Frankfurt, Germany, ran for 24 minutes and was cleared at about 10:50 a.m. ET.

A day earlier, on Sept. 20, Comcast Communications LLC experienced an outage that impacted several customers and downstream partners in multiple locations, including the U.S., China, Hong Kong and Switzerland. The disruption appeared to center on nodes in Los Angeles, Santa Clara, and Sunnyvale, Calif.; Houston; New York; Richmond, Va.; Pittsburgh, Pa.; and Denver. The interruption lasted about 18 minutes and was cleared at around 5:10 p.m. ET.

ThousandEyes also observed seven collaboration-app disruptions in the Sept. 18 week, compared to three in the prior week. All disruptions occurred in the U.S., marking so far the biggest number of domestic collaboration-app outages within a week in 2021.

Business-hours outages globally increased to 40% in the previous week, with the same metric in the U.S. increasing by 13 percentage points to 46%. In Europe, the Middle East and Africa, business-hours disruptions inched up 2 percentage points to 35%, while such outages in the Asia-Pacific region dropped 6 percentage points to 30%.