US internet outages surge 57% in late 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.

U.S. internet outages jumped 57% to 127 in the week of May 21, compared to 81 in the preceding week, according to data from ThousandEyes, a network-monitoring service owned by Cisco Systems Inc.

The U.S. total comprised 48% of all global internet disruptions last week, which totaled 262, marking a 9% increase from 241 in the prior week.

ThousandEyes detected two notable outages last week.

A May 26 outage at Tata Communications (America) Inc. affected downstream partners and customers in Hong Kong as well as the U.S., China, India, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates. The 33-minute disruption, which ran across three occurrences over a period of one hour and 50 minutes, apparently centered on the Tata Communications Ltd. unit's nodes in Los Angeles; San Francisco; Paris; Singapore; and Pune and Delhi, India. The outage was finally cleared at about 6:35 a.m. ET.

Two days earlier, on May 24, Microsoft Corp. dealt with an interruption impacting some downstream partners and access to services running on Microsoft environments. The 14-minute disruption, which appeared to center on nodes in Des Moines, Iowa, was cleared around 12:50 p.m. ET.

Last week's collaboration-app outages, all of which occurred in the U.S., dipped to three from five in the prior week.

Global business-hours disruptions decreased 4 percentage points to 41%, while the metric in the U.S. fell 16 percentage points to 33%. Such outages in Europe, the Middle East and Africa dipped 3 percentage points to 47%, while the figure for the Asia-Pacific region increased 18 percentage points to 52%.