Internet outages decline 27% in late March

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 week of March 27 saw a 27% drop in the number of global internet outages, marking the fifth weekly decrease in a row after spiking in late February, according to data from ThousandEyes, a network-monitoring service owned by Cisco Systems Inc.

Global outages fell to 247 from 340 in the previous week, while U.S. outages decreased 31% to 107 from 155. In total, U.S. outages comprised 43% of all global outages, down from 46% in the week earlier.

On March 30, U.S.-based internet service provider Cogent Communications Holdings Inc. experienced an outage that impacted multiple downstream providers and customers globally. The outage was first observed about 7 a.m. ET and ran for around 44 minutes. The interruption apparently centered on nodes in El Paso, Texas; Washington, D.C.; and Phoenix.

ThousandEyes also observed an outage on March 31 that impacted AT&T Inc. customers in countries such as the U.S., the U.K., Japan, Germany, Canada, Australia, India, Brazil, South Korea, Switzerland and the Netherlands. The outage that lasted 18 minutes was cleared around 10:05 p.m. ET.

Microsoft Corp. on April 1 experienced an interruption that appeared to impact the availability of Microsoft Azure DNS services to customers in countries including the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Australia, Sweden, Japan, France, Ireland, China, Turkey and Ukraine. The outage ran for 24 minutes before the affected services were restored about 6 p.m. ET.

Global outages among collaboration apps during the week remained at par with the prior week's total of seven outages. None of the interruptions occurred in the U.S.

Meanwhile, 34% of last week's network outages occurred within business hours, a 12% drop from the prior week, following two consecutive weeks of increases. In the U.S., 31% of the outages were within business hours, down 5%. In Europe, the Middle East and Africa, 36% of all outages were within business hours, while the same metric in Asia-Pacific was 34%. The business-hour interruptions represent decreases of 21% in EMEA and 17% in APAC from the previous week.