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.
A Dec. 7 outage at Amazon.com Inc.'s Amazon Web Services Inc. led the list of global internet disruptions that occurred during the week of Dec. 4.
Overall, the number of disruptions globally jumped by 60% to 444, according to data from ThousandEyes, a network-monitoring service owned by Cisco Systems Inc. U.S. outages last week rose 133% to 175, comprising 39% of all global disruptions and an increase from 27% in the prior week.
The AWS disruption was divided into two occurrences, with the first lasting a little over an hour and the second running for eight hours until around 8 p.m. ET. The interruption, which apparently centered on infrastructure in Northern Virginia, affected multiple AWS services across various regions, including the U.S., Europe, Asia-Pacific, Japan and China. Amazon identified issues related to its application programming interface, which allows applications to communicate with one another.
The interruption affected various Amazon services, including streaming service Prime Music, videoconferencing tool Chime and home-security system Ring, as well as other third-party applications that depend on Amazon's cloud, Dow Jones Newswires reported, citing website outage tracker Downdetector.
A separate outage Dec. 9 impacted some downstream partners and customers of NTT Global-owned internet service provider NTT America Inc. across the U.S. and Japan. The disruption, which lasted nearly 54 minutes before being cleared at about 2:55 a.m. ET, apparently centered on nodes in Ashburn, Va.
ThousandEyes also observed 12 collaboration-app disruptions last week, up from three in the prior week. Seven of the outages occurred in the U.S.
Global business-hours disruptions remained at 31% of the global total. The metric in the U.S. dipped 3 percentage points to 25%, while in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, business-hours outages increased 10 percentage points to 24%. Business-hours outages in the Asia-Pacific region rose 6 percentage points to 44% of the region's total disruptions.
