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.

A disruption to business communications platform Slack Technologies Inc. contributed to the increase in internet outages during the week of Feb. 19, according to data from ThousandEyes, a network-monitoring service owned by Cisco Systems Inc.

Global disruptions increased 5% to 283, while U.S. outages jumped 16% to 138. The latest U.S. total accounted for 49% of all global outages, up from 44% in the week of Feb. 12.

The Slack outage on Feb. 22 affected users of its messaging services. Slack confirmed the disruption, which it attributed to a configuration change on its database infrastructure. The platform was able to restore the services and eventually clear the outage at about 12:14 p.m., after a period of over three hours.

Website outage tracker Downdetector received more than 10,000 reports of Slack outages at about 9:30 a.m. ET on Feb. 22, according to a Dow Jones Newswires report. Slack said its platform was not loading properly for some users.

Two days later on Feb. 24, Hong Kong-based PCCW Ltd. dealt with an interruption that affected some networks and customers in multiple countries, including the U.S. and China. The 12-minute outage, which apparently centered on the internet service provider's nodes in Ashburn, Va., was cleared around 10:20 p.m. ET.

Collaboration-app disruptions increased to 33% to 12 in the Feb. 19 week. Four of the outages occurred in the U.S., the same level as in the prior week.

Global business-hours outages comprised 35% of all outages in the previous week. The metric in the U.S. dipped 4 percentage points to 34%, while business-hours outages in Europe, the Middle East and Africa jumped 11 percentage points to 39%. Such disruptions in the Asia-Pacific region fell 26 percentage points to 35% of the global total.