Internet outages decrease 26% in late 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.

Global internet outages dropped 26% to 256 in the week of Aug. 28, compared to 346 in the prior week, according to data from ThousandEyes, a network-monitoring service owned by Cisco Systems Inc.

The decrease ends the three-week upward trend in the volume of internet outages globally, which began with the week of Aug. 7.

U.S. outages also decreased, with a 15% week-over-week fall to 128 from 150 in the prior week. The U.S. total comprised 50% of the total global disruptions for the Aug. 28 week, higher than 43% in the prior week.

ThousandEyes detected two notable outages in the previous week.

Microsoft Corp. on Sept. 1 experienced an interruption that affected some downstream partners as well as access to services running on Microsoft environments. The disruption, likely a maintenance exercise, apparently centered on nodes in Des Moines, Iowa; Chicago; Spokane, Wash.; New York; Los Angeles; Portland, Ore.; Cleveland; Amsterdam; and Sydney. The outage ran for 29 minutes and was cleared at about 2:45 a.m. ET.

On Sept. 2, U.S.-based multinational transit provider Cogent Communications Holdings Inc. dealt with a disruption that impacted various downstream partners and customers in multiple countries, including the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Brazil, Canada, Singapore and South Africa. The outage, which appeared to center on nodes in New York, lasted around 14 minutes and was cleared at about 4:20 a.m. ET.

ThousandEyes also observed three collaboration-app outages in the Aug. 28 week, one less compared to prior-week figures. One of these disruptions occurred in the U.S.

Business-hours disruptions decreased 5 percentage points week over week to 35%, while the same metric in the U.S. fell 6 percentage points to 35% in the Aug. 28 week. In Europe, the Middle East and Africa, business-hours outages fell 7 percentage points to 36%, while such outages in the Asia-Pacific region also decreased 7 percentage points to 31%.