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.

2022 opened with the number of global internet disruptions down 2% to 227 in the week of Jan. 1, continuing a downward trend that started in mid-December 2021, according to data from ThousandEyes, a network-monitoring service owned by Cisco Systems Inc.

Meanwhile, U.S. disruptions increased 9% to 72 from 66 in the prior week, with the recent total comprising 32% of all global outages.

ThousandEyes detected two notable interruptions last week.

A Jan. 3 outage at Oracle Corp. affected customers and downstream partners using Oracle Cloud services in the U.S. The disruption apparently centered on nodes in Austin, Texas. The outage ran for 12 minutes across two occurrences within a 25-minute period before it was cleared at about 5:35 a.m. ET.

Microsoft Corp. on Jan. 5 experienced a disruption that appeared to center on nodes in Chicago. The interruption, likely a maintenance exercise, impacted some downstream partners and access to Microsoft-based services. The 9-minute outage was cleared at around 11:30 p.m. ET.

No collaboration-app outages were detected last week, the first such occurrence in over a year.

Global business-hours outages accounted for 39% of all disruptions in the previous week. The metric in the U.S. dropped 10 percentage points week over week to 31%, while in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, business-hours outages increased by 10 percentage points to 51%. Such outages in the Asia-Pacific region dropped by 6 percentage points to 36% of the global total.