Global internet outages fall 35%, business-hours disruptions increase in March

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 35% to 227 in the week of March 5, ending a two-week upward trend that started in the third week of February, according to data from ThousandEyes, a network-monitoring service owned by Cisco Systems Inc.

But more of those disruptions occurred during business hours for internet users in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.

In the U.S., total disruptions decreased 48% to 71 in the most recent week, comprising 31% of the global total. The proportion of U.S. outages that occurred during business hours remained unchanged week over week, at 43%.

In other regions, business-hours disruptions exceeded 50% for the first time this year. In Europe, the Middle East and Africa, 54% of all recorded outages occurred during business hours. In the Asia-Pacific region, 56% of disruptions happened during business hours.

Notable disruptions in the past week included a March 8 outage that impacted Google Traffic Director customers using Google LLC's virtual private cloud service. The disruption, attributed to a back-end issue, resulted in Spotify AB, Wikipedia and other applications returning server errors for some users. The interruption lasted two hours and 35 minutes and was cleared at about 3:42 p.m. ET after the Alphabet Inc. unit reprogrammed the affected service's configurations.

A day later, Microsoft Corp. dealt with a disruption that affected some downstream partners as well as access to Microsoft-based services. The outage, which apparently centered on nodes in Des Moines, Iowa, ran for 19 minutes and was cleared around 5:55 p.m. ET.

Collaboration-app disruptions decreased 75% during the last week to four total, including three in the U.S.