US internet outages reach highest YTD in 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.

U.S. internet outages jumped 82% to 167 in the week of July 2, from 92 in the prior week, according to data from ThousandEyes, a network-monitoring service owned by Cisco Systems Inc.

The U.S. total comprised 57% of last week's global disruptions, which totaled 291. The U.S. total marked the largest number of domestic outages for the year-to-date, above the 138 recorded in the third week of February.

Global outages rose 27% week over week to 291. They included a notable outage involving one of Canada's largest internet service providers, Rogers Communications Inc., that disrupted service to Rogers' internet users for several hours July 8. The outage was caused by an internal network issue following a maintenance update.

Other significant disruptions last week included a July 7 outage that affected AT&T Inc. partners and customers in the U.S., Australia, Austria, Bulgaria, Canada, China, India, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, South Africa and Spain. The outage apparently centered on nodes in San Jose, Calif.; Seattle; Chicago; and Ashburn, Va., according to ThousandEyes. The interruption, which ran for around 19 minutes, was cleared at about 4:40 a.m. ET.

Two days earlier, on July 5, multinational transit provider Cogent Communications Holdings Inc. dealt with an interruption that impacted downstream providers in the U.S., Australia, China, Hong Kong, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Singapore. The 26-minute disruption, which ran across a period of 2 hours and 10 minutes, centered on nodes in Oakland, Calif.; Boston; Los Angeles; and San Francisco. It was cleared around 2:25 a.m. ET.

Collaboration-app disruptions dropped 53% to seven for the week. Five of those outages occurred in the U.S.

While overall internet outages were higher in early July, the percentage that occurred during business hours fell across regions, accounting for a minority of the total.

Global business-hours outages fell 20 percentage points to 19% of total outages. In the U.S., business-hours outages dropped 22 percentage points to 16% of the region's total. In Europe, the Middle East and Africa, business-hours disruptions fell 15 percentage points to 21%. The metric dropped 17 percentage points to 25% of the total in the Asia-Pacific region.