ThousandEyes: Internet Disruptions Increased by 63 Percent Due to COVID-19
According to a recent report by ThousandEyes, Internet service disruptions have increased in frequency by 64 percent in the months following the COVID-19 outbreak. This information comes from the Internet Performance Report, based on measurements collected by the ThousandEyes platform between January and July 2020. The report found that the coronavirus pandemic has significantly affected how the Internet performs thanks to increasing network strain.
ThousandEyes found a 63 percent increase in global Internet disruptions in March compared to January, which has only shrunken down to a 45 percent increase over January’s numbers in June. In particular, APAC and North America ISPs suffered the most heavy amount of new outages. ThousandEyes connected this to the pandemic-related “shelter-in-place” orders sent out by companies, especially ramping up in March onward.
The report also found that increased disruptions across provider networks weren’t due to increased congestion, but rather increased traffic engineering activity. ThousandEyes found that performance indicators like traffic delay, loss, and jitter were within tolerable ranges, meaning that systemic duress wasn’t to blame. However, network disruptions were longer and involved more infrastructure, indicating more control plane related disruptions.
In the company’s press release, ThousandEyes’ Director of Product Marketing Angelique Medina stated: “With the overnight transition to a remote workforce, remote schooling, and remote entertainment that many countries experienced in March, we saw outages spike to unprecedented levels — especially among Internet Service Providers who seem to have been more vulnerable to disruptions than cloud providers. With the Internet Performance Report, businesses can benchmark Internet performance pre and post COVID-19 and plan for a more resilient IT environment as they continue to build out infrastructures that can manage the external dependencies on cloud and Internet networks that employee and consumer experiences now rely on.”
Download the Internet Performance Report here.
Daniel Hein
Dan is a tech writer who writes about Cybersecurity for Solutions Review. He graduated from Fitchburg State University with a Bachelor's in Professional Writing. You can reach him at dhein@solutionsreview.com
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