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 volume of global internet outages in the first week of October decreased 11% to 345, including a disruption to Facebook Inc.'s backbone network that caused a long outage to its social networking platforms on Oct. 4, according to data from ThousandEyes, a network-monitoring service owned by Cisco Systems Inc.

The 345 disruptions in the week of Oct. 2 compared to 388 outages in the prior week. Meanwhile, U.S. outages dipped 5% to 168 from 176 in the preceding week. This is the second consecutive weekly decrease for the U.S. total, which comprised 49% of the total global outages for the most recent week compared to 45% in the prior week.

The Facebook-linked outage on Oct. 4 sent Facebook, Instagram LLC and WhatsApp Inc. offline and made them unavailable globally for more than seven hours. The disruption and subsequent disconnection to Facebook's data centers led to another issue where the company's authoritative name servers stopped advertising the routes to Facebook's servers, making its platforms inaccessible. Facebook eventually fixed a faulty configuration change on its network, which it identified as the root cause of the outage before it was finally cleared around 6:45 p.m. ET.

Facebook's platforms dealt with another disruption on Oct. 8, with reported outages starting to rise before 3 p.m. ET, Dow Jones Newswires reported. Just after 5 p.m. ET that day, the Instagram communications team declared the issue resolved.

A day earlier, on Oct. 7, Sweden-based internet service provider Telia Carrier AB experienced an interruption that affected downstream partners and customers in the U.S., Canada, and 12 other countries. The outage apparently centered on nodes in Sweden, London, Ashburn, Va., and Newark, NJ. The disruption ran for 1 hour and 14 minutes and was cleared about 1:15 pm ET.

ThousandEyes also observed six collaboration-app outages in the Oct. 2 week, up from three disruptions in the prior week. All six disruptions occurred in the U.S.

Business-hours disruptions globally increased 4 percentage points to 42% in the previous week, with the same metric in the U.S. falling 5 percentage points to 40%. In Europe, the Middle East and Africa, business-hours outages rose 11 percentage points to 47%, while such outages in the Asia-Pacific region increased 14 percentage points to 41%.