US internet outages up 16% in 3rd week of July

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U.S. internet outages jumped 16% to 114 in the week of July 16, from 98 in the preceding week, according to data from ThousandEyes, a network-monitoring service owned by Cisco Systems Inc.

The U.S. total marked a return to levels in early June. It accounted for 42% of the 274 global disruptions observed last week, a 7% dip from 296 in the July 9 week.

ThousandEyes observed two notable outages last week, both occurring July 20.

Network transit provider Hurricane Electric LLC dealt with a disruption that affected downstream partners and customers in the U.S., the U.K., Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Germany, Japan, Malaysia, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates. The 13-minute outage, which apparently centered on nodes in San Jose, Calif., was cleared around 2:25 p.m. ET.

Later in the day, an issue at Microsoft Corp.'s Teams platform impacted users' ability to access the service for around three hours, despite network connectivity to the service apparently not experiencing major problems. Microsoft later said a recent deployment led to a connectivity issue to an internal storage system. The videoconferencing platform appeared to be accessible again for most global users at about 12:15 a.m. ET.

Collaboration-app outages dipped to eight from nine last week. Four of such outages occurred in the U.S.

Global business-hours disruptions went up 7 percentage points to 48% of total outages, while the figure in the U.S. dipped 1 percentage point to 34%. Two other regions registered increases in business-hours disruptions, both surpassing the global percentage, the third such occurrence in 2022. Europe, the Middle East and Africa recorded an 18-percentage-point increase to 52%, while the Asia-Pacific region had 67% of its total outages occurring within business hours, a surge of 15 percentage points.