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 increased by 16% to 290 during the week of May 8, reversing a brief decline seen the prior week, according to data from ThousandEyes, a network-monitoring service owned by Cisco Systems Inc.
U.S. outages also increased, up 39% week over week to 132. The U.S. accounted for 46% of all global disruptions, up from 38% in the previous week.
Among the most notable recent outages was a May 12 disruption that affected U.S. downstream partners and customers of IP transit and cloud services provider NetActuate Inc. The disruption centered on nodes in Raleigh and Durham, N.C. The interruption lasted about 13 minutes, divided into two occurrences spanning a 30-minute period before it was cleared at about 4:05 p.m. ET.
Additionally, on May 13, Tata Communications Ltd. unit and global internet service provider Tata Communications (America) Inc. experienced a network disruption that affected customers and downstream partners in the U.S., the U.K., Hong Kong and 10 other countries. The outage ran for 30 minutes, split into two periods over a span of 55 minutes. The interruption, which centered on nodes in Tokyo, Hong Kong and Los Angeles, was cleared around 11:10 p.m. ET.
ThousandEyes also observed an interruption May 11 that impacted multiple services of enterprise software company Salesforce.com Inc. The outage, which Salesforce traced to domain-name system issues, resulted in users experiencing issues logging on and navigating to the Salesforce Core application, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud and Experience Cloud. The disruption was first observed around 5:10 p.m. ET with a fix implemented at about 7:45 p.m. ET before it was completely cleared around 10:15 p.m. ET.
Global outages among collaboration apps for the week increased 33% to four, compared to three in the previous week. The U.S. accounted for just one of these outages, compared to the prior week's total of two.
Business-hours outages comprised 34% of the total outages in the week, up 5 percentage points from the week prior. In the U.S., business-hours outages also increased 8 percentage points to 35% when compared to the previous week.
In Europe, the Middle East and Africa, 37% of the global outages occurred during business hours, a 12-percentage-point decrease week over week. The metric in the Asia-Pacific region also fell 17 percentage points to 30% when compared to the previous week.
