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 that could impact their virtual commute.

The number of internet outages in the U.S. rose 10% during the week ended Oct. 23, while outages globally declined slightly for the third consecutive week.

Global outages spiked to a recent high of 291 during the week ended Oct. 10 but have fallen ever since, hitting 222 during the last week, according to data from ThousandEyes, a network-monitoring service owned by Cisco Systems Inc. In the last week, U.S. outages totaled 118, up from 107 the prior week but still below an earlier high during the first week of October.

The number of outages occurring during regular U.S. business hours also rose slightly from 26% to 28%, according to Angelique Medina, director of product marketing for ThousandEyes.

The most significant outage of the past week involved two related network-access failures that lasted a total of 18 minutes, beginning just after 2 a.m. ET on Oct. 20. The outages impacted customers of Cogent Communications Holdings Inc., a U.S.-based ISP that provides high-speed connections to other ISPs and large corporate customers in more than 200 major markets.

The first and more serious of the related Cogent outages lasted eight minutes and affected internet nodes across the company's fiberoptic network infrastructure in Chicago, Denver, Cleveland, Salt Lake City, Dallas and San Francisco, according to ThousandEyes. Because Cogent provides connectivity for other network providers, the problem affected a wide array of Cogent customers and their partners in the U.S. as well as some in Europe and Asia-Pacific, Medina said.

The second Cogent-based incident began 15 minutes after the first was resolved and lasted 10 minutes. It had much less impact because it was centered around Cogent networks in San Jose, Calif.

ThousandEyes counted only one network outage globally affecting cloud-based collaboration apps such as Zoom Video Communications Inc.'s signature service and Microsoft Corp.'s Teams in the past week. That compared to four during the week prior. The outage, which was in the U.S., lasted five minutes and occurred during early morning hours, which makes it less likely to be a glitch and more likely to have been planned for maintenance purposes, said ThousandEyes' Medina.

In general, internet performance within the U.S. was reasonably good during the week of Oct. 17 through Oct. 23, with a majority of associated networks and infrastructure consistently available across the country. Poor performance or outages not detected nationally may be the result of problems with local Wi-Fi access points or congestion on local ISP networks, according to ThousandEyes.