Global internet outages jump 11%, US disruptions dip 2% in mid-May

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 went up 11% to 241 in the week of May 14, compared to 218 in the prior week, according to data from ThousandEyes, a network-monitoring service owned by Cisco Systems Inc.

U.S. disruptions, in contrast, dipped 2% to 81, comprising 34% of all global outages.

Last week's notable outages include a May 17 disruption at internet service provider NTT America Inc. that affected downstream partners and customers in the U.S., the U.K., Germany and the Netherlands. The 20-minute interruption, which apparently centered on the NTT Global unit's nodes in Dallas, Seattle, and San Jose, Calif., was cleared around 11:25 a.m. ET.

Two days later, on May 19, Amazon.com Inc. experienced an outage affecting customers and downstream partners in the U.S., Armenia, Brazil, France and India. The interruption, which lasted about 10 minutes and appeared to center on nodes in Ashburn, Va., was finally cleared at about 2:55 p.m. ET.

Collaboration-app outages last week, all of which occurred in the U.S., decreased to five from seven in the prior week.

Global business-hours outages surged 15 percentage points to 45%, while the metric in the U.S. increased 21 percentage points to 49%. Such outages in Europe, the Middle East and Africa jumped 17 percentage points to 50%, while the figure for the Asia-Pacific region fell 12 percentage points to 34%.