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.

Global internet outages nudged up 4% to 257 in the week of Jan. 15, marking the second consecutive weekly increase since the preceding week, according to data from ThousandEyes, a network-monitoring service owned by Cisco Systems Inc.

U.S. outages, meanwhile, dipped 4% to 94 from 98 in the prior week. The current total comprised 36% of all global disruptions, down from 40% in the week of Jan. 8.

ThousandEyes detected two notable interruptions last week.

Fresh from an outage almost two weeks ago, U.S.-based multinational transit provider Cogent Communications Holdings Inc. on Jan. 20 dealt with a series of outages that impacted multiple downstream partners and customers globally. The disruptions, which ran for 40 minutes across a period of one hour and 28 minutes, centered on nodes in Denver; Salt Lake City; Dallas; Phoenix; and Sacramento and Oakland, Calif. The interruption was cleared at about 11:35 p.m. ET.

Three days earlier, on Jan. 17, Hong Kong-based internet service provider PCCW Ltd. experienced an outage affecting some networks and customers in countries including the U.S., Singapore, Thailand and China. The interruption, which apparently centered on nodes in Singapore, lasted 34 minutes before it was cleared at about 9:50 p.m. ET.

Collaboration-app disruptions in the Jan. 21 week increased to nine from six in the prior week. Four such disruptions were observed in the U.S.

Global business-hours outages accounted for 39% of all disruptions in the previous week. The metric in the U.S. surged 17 percentage points week over week to 37%, while in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, business-hours interruptions decreased by 20 percentage points to 19%. Such outages in the Asia-Pacific region increased 22 percentage points to 47% of the worldwide total.