US internet disruptions fall 41% in 2nd week of July

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 U.S. internet outages dropped 41% to 98 in the week of July 9, from a year-to-date high of 167 the prior week, according to data from ThousandEyes, a network-monitoring service owned by Cisco Systems Inc.

The U.S. total comprised 33% of the 296 global outages observed last week. Among the more notable disruptions was a July 14 global outage of microblogging platform Twitter Inc., which last about 40 minutes. Twitter confirmed its service was fully resolved around 12:37 p.m. ET that day. A back-end application issue caused the outage.

Also on July 14, Sweden-based internet service provider Arelion AB, formerly Telia Carrier, dealt with a disruption that affected downstream partners and customers in the U.S., Brazil, Canada, Chile, the Czech Republic, Colombia, France, Germany, Hungary, Mexico, Peru and Singapore. The 23-minute outage, which apparently centered on nodes in Atlanta, ran across two occurrences over a 35-minute period. It was cleared at about 9:20 p.m. ET.

Collaboration-app outages increased 29% last week, to nine total. Seven of those outages occurred in the U.S.

Global business-hours disruptions accounted for 41% of total outages, an increase of 22 percentage points. The number of such outages increased in all regions, with the largest week-over-week increase in the Asia-Pacific region. Business-hours outages in Asia-Pacific accounted for 52% of the region's total, up 27 percentage points. In the U.S. and Europe, the Middle East and Africa, business-hours outages accounted for just over a third of each region's total, at 35% and 34%, respectively.