Global internet outages down 23% in the 3rd week of July

This weekly feature of S&P Global Market Intelligence, in collaboration with internet service monitoring company ThousandEyes, aims to give remote workers information about internet service outages.

The number of global internet outages fell 23% in the week of July 17, to 276, ending three straight weeks of gains that began in late June, according to data from ThousandEyes, a network monitoring service owned by Cisco Systems Inc.

Outages in the United States also fell, down 27% from the previous week to 130. The US total included 47% of all outages worldwide for the week of July 17, down from 49% the week before.

ThousandEyes has detected two notable outages over the past week, including a July 22 outage in Akamai Technologies Inc.’s Edgekey Domain Name System service that caused intermittent or complete loss of access to a large number of websites and applications for a little over an hour. . The interruption was first observed at approximately 11:40 a.m.ET and was resolved at 12:45 p.m. ET with affected customers resuming access to the Edgekey-related content delivery network service.

A day earlier, on July 21, transit provider Hurricane Electric LLC encountered a disruption affecting downstream partners and customers in the United States and 16 other countries. The outage focused on nodes in New York, Marseille, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Paris and London, and lasted about 29 minutes over three occurrences in two and a quarter hours. The interruption was lifted at approximately 6:40 p.m. ET.

ThousandEyes detected six failures in collaboration applications, including three in the United States, during the week of July 17. This compares to five global blackouts, including two in the United States, the week before.

Forty-two percent of all global outages in the week of July 17 occurred during business hours, up from 40 percent the week before. Nationally, 37% of all outages in the United States occurred during business hours, down 3 percentage points from the previous week. The proportion of outages during business hours in Europe, the Middle East and Africa increased by 7 percentage points on a week-over-week basis to 48%, while these disruptions in the Asia-Pacific region increased by 8 percentage points to reach 52%.