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 climbed 22% to 278 in the week of March 12, marking a return to levels last seen in the third week of January, according to data from ThousandEyes, a network-monitoring service owned by Cisco Systems Inc.

U.S. disruptions increased 44% to 102 in the measured period, comprising 37% of all global outages, up from 31% in the week of March 5. However, business-hours disruptions across all regions decreased during the week, with the global total falling 16 percentage points to 34%.

U.S. interruptions during business hours dropped 18 percentage points to 25%, while such outages in Europe, the Middle East and Africa also decreased 18 percentage points to 36%. Business-hours outages in the Asia-Pacific region dipped 7 percentage points to 49%.

ThousandEyes detected two notable outages in the previous week, including one on March 16 that affected downstream partners and customers of Sweden-based Arelion AB, formerly Telia Carrier, in countries including the U.S., Brazil, Australia, Canada, Germany and India. The disruption, which apparently centered on the internet service provider's nodes in Dallas, ran for 28 minutes across two occurrences over a 35-minute period before it was cleared at about 4:05 a.m. ET.

A day later, multinational transit provider Cogent Communications Holdings Inc. dealt with an interruption that affected customers and downstream partners in the U.S. and five other countries. The outage, which centered on nodes in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., lasted 14 minutes and was cleared around 5:15 a.m. ET.

Collaboration-app outages tripled last week to a total of 12, including seven in the U.S.