US internet outages drop 16% in mid-June

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 fell 16% to 94 in the week of June 11, marking a return to levels last seen in May-end, according to data from ThousandEyes, a network-monitoring service owned by Cisco Systems Inc.

The U.S. total comprised 34% of all global disruptions last week, which totaled 278, a 5% increase from 265 in the prior week.

There were two notable disruptions last week, both occurring June 16.

An interruption at multinational transit provider Cogent Communications Holdings Inc. affected customers and downstream partners in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain and South Africa. The 19-minute disruption, which centered on nodes in London and York, England, was cleared at about 8:45 a.m. ET.

Later in the afternoon, internet service provider NTT America Inc. experienced an outage that impacted some downstream partners and customers in the U.S., Argentina, Brazil, Japan, Panama and Uruguay. The disruption, which apparently centered on nodes in Miami, ran for about 28 minutes and was cleared around 4:20 p.m. ET.

Collaboration-app disruptions last week dropped to four from seven in the prior week. One of the outages occurred in the U.S.

Global business-hours outages went up 9 percentage points to 39%, while the figure in the U.S. increased 5 percentage points to 41%. Such disruptions in Europe, the Middle East and Africa dipped 2 percentage points to 45%, while the metric for the Asia-Pacific region jumped 15 percentage points to 30%.