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.

Although global internet outages in the first week of February were relatively unchanged compared to the prior week, there was a notable reduction in outages during local business hours, according to data from ThousandEyes, a network-monitoring service owned by Cisco Systems Inc.

The number of global outages in the week ended Feb. 5 was 299, compared to 300 a week earlier. U.S. outages dropped to 109 from 145, a 25% decrease. U.S. outages accounted for 36% of all global outages in the week ended Feb. 5, down from 48% in the previous week.

There were two major outages recorded early in the week. A Feb. 1 outage at Fremont, CA.-based network transit provider Hurricane Electric LLC impacted users across multiple countries including the U.S., New Zealand and Brazil. The outage lasted about nine minutes and impacted access to customer networks including The Walt Disney Co.'s streaming services and Microsoft Corp.'s LinkedIn networking platform.

Then on Feb. 2, Tata Communications (America) Inc. experienced an outage that lasted about 18 minutes across a half-hour period and impacted the networks of customers such as Wells Fargo & Co., Twitter Inc. and Salesforce.com inc. in multiple countries including the U.S., Hong Kong and India.

ThousandEyes identified three outages among collaboration apps worldwide during the week, down 57% from the seven recorded the previous week. All three of these outages were observed in the U.S, compared to two the week prior, marking the first time since mid-December 2020 that more than two collaboration application network outages were observed in a week.

Most of the outages identified by ThousandEyes occurred outside of business hours, lessening the impact on remote workers. The data found that the proportion of outages within business hours decreased to 28%, from 44% in the week prior. Within the U.S., 24% of the outages were within local business hours, a 23% decrease from the previous week. In EMEA, 27% of all outages occurred within business hours, while the same was number in APAC was 32%.