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The reliability of services delivered by ISPs, cloud providers and conferencing services is critical for enterprise organizations. ThousandEyes, a Cisco company, monitors how providers are handling any performance challenges and provides Network World with a weekly roundup of events that impact service delivery. Read on to see the latest analysis, and stop back next week for another update on the performance of cloud providers and ISPs.

Note: We have archived prior-year outage updates, including our 2024 report, 2023 report, and Covid-19 coverage.

Internet Report for Oct. 6-Oct. 12

ThousandEyes reported 185 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks, and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of October 6 through October 12. The total of outage events decreased by 18% compared to the 226 outages from the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 113 outages, which is down 14% from 132 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages decreased from 133 last week to 124, down 7%. In the U.S., ISP outages fell from 77 to 70, down 9% week-over-week.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, public cloud network outages decreased from 46 to 22, down 52% compared to the previous week. In the U.S., public cloud network outages fell from 38 to 19, down 50%.
• Collaboration app network outages: Both global and U.S. collaboration application network outages remained at zero, unchanged from the previous week.

Two Notable Outages

On October 9, GitHub, a U.S.-based software development and version control platform headquartered in San Francisco, California, experienced an outage that impacted some of its users and customers across multiple regions, including the U.S., the U.K., France, India and Hong Kong. The outage, which lasted a total of 29 minutes over a forty-minute period, was first observed around 10:40 AM EDT and appeared to be centered on GitHub nodes located in Washington, D.C. The outage was cleared around 11:20 AM. Click here for an interactive view.

On October 7, Lumen, a U.S. based Tier 1 carrier (previously known as CenturyLink), experienced an outage that affected customers and downstream partners across multiple regions including the U.S., Brazil, Hong Kong, the U.K., India, the Philippines, France, Australia, and Canada. The outage, lasting a total of 41 minutes over a period of 56 minutes, was first observed around 12:24 PM EDT and appeared to initially be centered on Lumen nodes located in Seattle, WA.  Around five minutes into the outage, nodes located in Seattle, WA, were joined by nodes located in Portland, OR, and Dallas, TX, in exhibiting outage conditions. This increase in affected nodes and locations appeared to coincide with a rise in the number of impacted regions, downstream customers and partners. A further five minutes later the nodes located in Portland, OR, appeared to clear and were replaced by nodes located in Atlanta, GA. Around 25 minutes after first being observed, all nodes with the exception of those located in Seattle, WA, appeared to clear. A further 10 minutes later the nodes located in Seattle, WA, were joined by nodes located in Washington, D.C., in exhibiting outage conditions. Around 11 minutes after appearing to clear, nodes located in Seattle, WA, once again began exhibiting outage conditions. The outage was cleared around 1:20 PM EDT.  Click here for an interactive view.

Internet Report for Sept. 29-Oct. 5

ThousandEyes reported 226 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks, and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of September 29 through October 5. The total of outage events decreased by 26% compared to the 305 outages from the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 132 outages, which is down 23% from 171 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages decreased from 172 last week to 133, down 23%. In the U.S., ISP outages fell from 84 to 77, down 8% week-over-week.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, public cloud network outages decreased from 66 to 46, down 30% compared to the previous week. In the U.S., public cloud network outages fell from 45 to 38, down 16%.
• Collaboration app network outages: Both global and U.S. collaboration application network outages remained at zero, unchanged from the previous week.

Two Notable Outages

On October 2, UUNET Verizon, acquired by Verizon in 2006 and now operating as Verizon Business, experienced an outage that affected customers and partners across multiple regions, including the U.S. and Canada. The outage, which lasted 58 minutes, was first observed around 12:10 AM EDT and appeared to focus on Verizon Business nodes in Buffalo, NY. The outage was resolved around 1:10 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On October 2, Arelion (formerly known as Telia Carrier), a global Tier 1 provider headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, experienced an outage that impacted customers and downstream partners across multiple regions, including the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. The disruption, which lasted a total of 39 minutes over a one hour and 5-minute period, was first observed around 10:55 PM EDT and appeared to center on nodes located in Dallas, TX, and Los Angeles, CA. The outage was cleared around 11:50 PM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet Report for Sept. 22-28

ThousandEyes reported 305 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks, and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of September 22-28. The total of outage events increased by 1% compared to the 302 outages from the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 171 outages, which is up 6% from 161 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages increased from 137 to 172, a 26% rise. In the U.S., ISP outages doubled, rising from 42 to 84, a 100% increase week-over-week.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, public cloud network outages fell sharply from 102 to 66, a 35% decrease. In the U.S., public cloud network outages dropped from 81 to 45, a 44% decrease.
• Collaboration app network outages: Both global and U.S. collaboration application network outages remained at zero, unchanged from the previous week.

Two Notable Outages

On September 26, Zayo Group, a U.S. based Tier 1 carrier headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, experienced an outage that impacted some of its partners and customers across multiple regions, including the U.S., the Netherlands, Mexico, Switzerland, Ireland, the U.K., Germany, India, Spain, and Romania. The outage, which lasted a total of 32 minutes over a 53-minute period, was first observed around 11:28 PM EDT and appeared to be centered on Zayo nodes located in Chicago, IL.  Around ten minutes into the outage, a number of nodes located in Chicago, IL, appeared to clear. This decrease in the number of nodes exhibiting outage conditions, appeared to coincide with a decrease in the number of impacted downstream partners. The outage was cleared around 12:35 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On September 24, Cogent Communications, a multinational transit provider based in the U.S., experienced an outage that impacted multiple downstream providers and customers across multiple regions including the U.S., Canada, the Netherlands, the U.K., Spain, Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Bulgaria, and Germany. The outage, which lasted a total of 33 minutes, was distributed across a series of occurrences over a period of one hour and fifteen minutes. The first occurrence of the outage was observed around 5:20 AM EDT and initially seemed to be centered on Cogent nodes located in Salt Lake City, UT. Five minutes after appearing to clear, nodes located in Salt Lake City, UT, once again began exhibiting outage conditions, this time joined by nodes located in San Jose, CA, and Seattle, WA. Around an hour after first being observed the nodes located in San Jose, CA, Seattle, WA, and Salt Lake City, UT, were joined by nodes located in Santa Clara, CA, in exhibiting outage conditions. This increase in the number of nodes and locations exhibiting outage conditions, appeared to coincide with an increase in the number of impacted downstream partners. A further five minutes after appearing to clear, nodes located in Salt Lake City, UT, once again began exhibiting outage conditions. The outage was cleared around 6:35 AM EDT.  Click here for an interactive view.

Internet Report for Sept. 15-21

ThousandEyes reported 302 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks, and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of September 15-21. The total of outage events were nearly flat compared to the 301 outages from the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 161 outages, which is down 13% from 184 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages decreased from 145 to 137, a 6% decrease. In the U.S., ISP outages decreased from 68 to 42, a 38% decrease.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, public cloud network outages increased from 96 to 102, a 6% increase. In the U.S., however, outages decreased from 85 to 81, a 5% decrease.
• Collaboration app network outages: Both global and U.S. collaboration application network outages remained at zero, unchanged from the previous week.

Two Notable Outages

On September 19, Lumen, a U.S. based Tier 1 carrier (previously known as CenturyLink), experienced an outage that affected customers and downstream partners across multiple regions including the U.S., South Africa, Estonia, the Netherlands, Finland, the U.K., Chile, France, Argentina, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, and Belgium. The outage, lasting 9 minutes, was first observed around 12:56 AM EDT and appeared to be centered on Lumen nodes located in New York, NY. Around 4 minutes after first being observed, a number of nodes exhibiting outage conditions located in New York, appeared to clear. This decrease appeared to coincide with a drop in the number of impacted partners and customers. The outage was cleared around 1:10 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On September 19, Cogent Communications, a multinational transit provider based in the U.S., experienced an outage that impacted multiple downstream providers as well as Cogent customers across various regions, including the U.S., Spain, Egypt, Vietnam, and Australia. The outage, which lasted 12 minutes, was first observed around 6:36 AM EDT and appeared to initially center on Cogent nodes located in Los Angeles, CA, and San Francisco, CA. Around four minutes after first being observed, nodes located in Los Angeles, CA appeared to clear, and were replaced by nodes located in Portland, OR, in exhibiting outage conditions.  A further five minutes later nodes located in San Francisco, CA, appeared to clear, leaving just the nodes located in Portland, OR, in exhibiting outage condition. This decrease in nodes exhibiting outage conditions appeared to coincide with a drop in the number of impacted partners and customers. The outage was cleared around 6:50 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet Report for Sept. 8-14

ThousandEyes reported 301 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks, and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of September 8-14. The total of outage events decreased by 2% compared to the 308 outages from the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 184 outages, which is up 11% from 166 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages decreased from 158 to 145, an 8% decrease. In the U.S., however, ISP outages increased from 61 to 68, an 11% rise.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, public cloud network outages increased from 87 to 96, a 10% increase. In the U.S., outages rose from 71 to 85, a 20% increase.
• Collaboration app network outages: Both global and U.S. collaboration application network outages remained at zero, unchanged from the previous week.

Two Notable Outages

On September 10, Arelion (formerly known as Telia Carrier), a global Tier 1 provider headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, experienced an outage that impacted customers and downstream partners across multiple regions, including the U.S., Slovakia, Poland, Germany, Spain, Finland, Canada, France, and Mexico. The disruption, which lasted a total of 14 minutes over a 29-minute period, was first observed around 2:36 AM EDT and appeared to initially center on nodes located in Dallas, TX. Twenty-four minutes after first being observed, nodes in Dallas were joined by nodes in San Antonio, TX, in exhibiting outage conditions. The outage was cleared around 3:05 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On September 12, Hurricane Electric, a network transit provider based in Fremont, CA, experienced an outage that impacted customers and downstream partners across multiple regions, including the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Japan, Sweden, Singapore, New Zealand, Ireland, and Switzerland. The outage was first observed around 4:10 AM EDT and lasted a total of 6 minutes over a period of 35 minutes. The outage initially appeared to be centered on Hurricane Electric nodes located in San Jose, CA. Eleven minutes after appearing to clear, nodes located in San Jose, CA, once again began exhibiting outage conditions and were joined by nodes located in San Francisco, CA. The outage was cleared at around 4:45 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet Report for Sept. 1-7

ThousandEyes reported 308 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks, and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of September 1-7. The total of outage events increased by 18% compared to the 260 outages from the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 166 outages, which is up 22% from 136 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages increased from 135 to 158, a 17% increase. In the U.S., however, ISP outages held steady at 61.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, public cloud network outages increased from 65 to 87, a 34% increase. In the U.S., outages rose from 48 to 71, a 48% increase.
• Collaboration app network outages: Both global and U.S. collaboration application network outages dropped down to zero, compared to 4 the week prior.

Two Notable Outages

On September 2, Lumen, a U.S.-based Tier 1 carrier (previously known as CenturyLink), experienced an outage that affected customers and downstream partners across multiple regions, including the U.S., the U.K., the Philippines, Ireland, India, Canada, Malaysia, Argentina, Poland, and Bulgaria. The outage, lasting a total of one hour and 57 minutes over a period of two hours and 13 minutes, was first observed around 2:52 PM EDT and appeared to initially be centered on Lumen nodes located in Denver, CO. Around 28 minutes into the outage, nodes located in Denver, CO, were joined by nodes located in Chicago, IL, in exhibiting outage conditions. This increase appeared to coincide with a rise in the number of impacted regions, downstream customers, and partners. The outage was cleared around 5:05 PM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On September 6, GTT Communications, a Tier 1 provider headquartered in Tysons, VA, experienced an outage that impacted some of its partners and customers across multiple regions, including the U.S., Germany, France, Canada, Singapore, the U.K., Japan, Brazil, Taiwan, Argentina, India, South Africa, Italy, Spain, Egypt, Luxembourg, Australia, and Mexico. The outage, which lasted 42 minutes, was first observed around 6:42 AM EDT and appeared to initially be centered on GTT nodes located in Washington, D.C., New York, NY, Frankfurt, Germany, and Toronto, Canada. Around five minutes later, nodes located in Washington, D.C., New York, NY, Frankfurt, Germany, and Toronto, Canada, were joined by nodes located in London, England, Los Angeles, CA, and Chicago, IL, in exhibiting outage conditions. This increase appeared to coincide with a rise in the number of impacted regions, downstream customers, and partners. A further five minutes later, all nodes except those located in Washington, D.C., appeared to clear. The outage was cleared around 7:25 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet Report for Aug. 25-31

ThousandEyes reported 260 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of August 25-31 The total of outage events remained unchanged compared to the 260 outages from the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 136 outages, which is up 11% from 123 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages decreased from 154 to 135, a 12% decrease compared to the previous week. In the U.S., however, ISP outages increased from 52 to 61, a 17% increase.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, public cloud network outages increased from 57 to 65, a 14% increase compared to the previous week. In the U.S., outages increased from 44 to 48, a 9% increase.
• Collaboration app network outages: Both global and U.S. collaboration application network outages were up from zero to 4 outages last week.

Two notable outages

On August 26, Cogent Communications, a multinational transit provider based in the U.S., experienced an outage that impacted multiple downstream providers as well as Cogent customers across various regions, including the U.S., Australia, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, the U.K., Canada, Hong Kong, Armenia, Spain, South Korea, India, Chile, Germany, Taiwan, Costa Rica, Japan, The Netherlands, Uruguay, Argentina, and Italy. The outage, which lasted 22 minutes, was first observed around 2:30 AM EDT and appeared to initially center on Cogent nodes located in Chicago, IL, New York, NY, Seattle, WA, Los Angeles, CA, San Jose, CA, Washington, D.C., and Mexico City, Mexico. Around five minutes after first being observed, nodes located in Chicago, Seattle, WA, Washington, D.C., and Mexico City, Mexico, appeared to clear and were replaced by nodes located in Toronto, Canada, in exhibiting outage conditions. This decrease in nodes exhibiting outage conditions appeared to coincide with a drop in the number of impacted partners and customers. The outage was resolved around 2:55 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On August 27, Microsoft experienced an outage on its network that impacted some downstream partners and access to services running on Microsoft environments across the U.S. The outage, which lasted 34 minutes, was first observed around 6:50 AM EDT and appeared to be centered on Microsoft nodes located in Chicago, IL. Around 20 minutes after first being observed, a number of nodes exhibiting outage conditions located in Chicago, IL, appeared to clear. This decrease in nodes exhibiting outage conditions appeared to coincide with a drop in the number of impacted partners and customers. The outage was cleared around 7:25 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet Report for Aug. 18-24

ThousandEyes reported 260 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of August 18-24 That’s an increase of 6% from 246 outages from the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 123 outages, which is up 6% from 116 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages increased from 144 to 154, a 7% increase compared to the previous week. In the U.S., ISP outages rose from 44 to 52, an 18% increase.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, public cloud network outages decreased from 61 to 57, a 7% decrease compared to the previous week. In the U.S., outages declined from 53 to 44, a 17% decrease.
• Collaboration app network outages: Both global and U.S. collaboration application network outages recorded 0 outages, down from 1 each the previous week.

Two notable outages

On August 19, Arelion (formerly known as Telia Carrier), a global Tier 1 provider headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, experienced an outage that impacted customers and downstream partners across multiple regions, including the U.S., France, the U.K., Germany, Ireland, Spain, Norway, Saudi Arabia, Poland, Switzerland, Canada, Finland, Mexico, Singapore, India, and The Netherlands. The disruption, which lasted 59 minutes, was first observed around 12:25 AM EDT and appeared to initially center on nodes located in Newark, NJ, and Ashburn, VA. Five minutes after being first observed, the nodes located in Newark, NJ, appeared to clear and were replaced by nodes located in Chicago, IL, in exhibiting outage conditions. A further five minutes later, nodes located in Chicago, IL, appeared to clear, leaving only nodes located in Ashburn, VA, exhibiting outage conditions. This drop also appeared to coincide with a decrease in the number of downstream customers, partners, and regions impacted. Around twenty minutes later, the nodes located in Ashburn, VA, were joined by nodes located in Chicago, IL, and Los Angeles, CA, in exhibiting outage conditions. The outage was cleared around 1:25 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On August 20, GTT Communications, a Tier 1 provider headquartered in Tysons, VA, experienced an outage that affected some of its partners and customers across multiple regions including the U.S., Mexico and Canada. The disruption, which lasted a total of 18 minutes over a 39-minute period, was first observed around 4:56 AM EDT and appeared to initially center on GTT nodes in Dallas, TX. Sixteen minutes after appearing to clear, nodes located in Dallas, TX, once again began exhibiting outage conditions. A further five minutes later, the nodes located in Dallas, TX, were joined by nodes located in San Jose, CA, in exhibiting outage conditions. This increase in the number of nodes and locations exhibiting outage conditions appeared to coincide with an increase in the number of impacted downstream partners. The outage was cleared around 5:35 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet Report for Aug. 11-17

ThousandEyes reported 246 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of August 11-17 That’s a decrease of 19% from 302 outages from the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 116 outages, which is up 2% from 144 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages decreased from 173 to 144, a 17% decrease compared to the previous week. In the U.S., ISP outages were steady at 44.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages decreased from 79 to 61, a 23% drop compared to the previous week. In the U.S., outages declined slightly from 55 to 53, a 4% decrease.
• Collaboration app network outages: BBoth global and U.S. collaboration application network outages recorded 1 outage, unchanged from the previous week.

Two notable outages

On August 14, Cogent Communications, a multinational transit provider based in the U.S., experienced an outage that impacted multiple downstream providers as well as Cogent customers across various regions, including the U.S., Germany, the U.K., Spain, India, Colombia, the Netherlands, Canada, Luxembourg, South Africa, Belgium, Switzerland, Australia, Denmark, Hong Kong, Mexico, and Turkey. The outage, which lasted 24 minutes, was first observed around 4:20 PM EDT and appeared to initially center on Cogent nodes located in Chicago, IL, New York, NY, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, OH, and Frankfurt, Germany. Around five minutes after first being observed, nodes located in Chicago, IL, and Frankfurt, Germany, appeared to clear and were replaced by nodes located in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in exhibiting outage conditions. A further five minutes on, nodes located in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, were replaced by nodes located in Boston, MA, in exhibiting outage condition. The outage was resolved around 4:45 PM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On August 15, GTT Communications, a Tier 1 provider headquartered in Tysons, VA, experienced an outage that impacted some of its partners and customers across multiple regions, including the U.S., Germany, France, Canada, the U.K., South Africa, Brazil, Luxembourg, The United Arab Emirates, India, Ireland, Spain, and Australia. The outage, which lasted 9 minutes, was first observed around 9:40 AM EDT and appeared to initially be centered on GTT nodes located in Chicago, IL, Dallas, TX, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, GA, Toronto, Canada, Frankfurt, Germany, Minneapolis, MN, and New York, NY. Around five minutes after first being observed, all the nodes except those located in Chicago, IL, appeared to clear. The outage was cleared around 9:50 AM EDT.  Click here for an interactive view.

Internet Report for Aug. 4-10

ThousandEyes reported 302 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of August 4-10. That’s an increase of 61% from 187 outages from the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 114 outages, which is up 30% from 88 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages increased from 97 to 173 outages, a 78% increase compared to the week prior. In the U.S., ISP outages increased from 38 to 44 outages, a 16% increase.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages increased from 43 to 79 outages, an 84% increase compared to the week prior. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages increased from 30 to 55 outages, an 83% increase.
• Collaboration app network outages: Both global and U.S. collaboration application network outages recorded 1 outage last week, up from zero the week prior.

Two notable outages

On August 7, Arelion (formerly known as Telia Carrier), a global Tier 1 provider headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, experienced an outage that impacted customers and downstream partners across multiple regions, including the U.S. and Mexico. The disruption, which lasted a total of 27 minutes over a one-hour and 39-minute period, was first observed around 1:31 AM EDT and appeared to initially center on nodes located in Mexico City, Mexico, and Guadalajara, Mexico. Twenty-five minutes after appearing to clear, the nodes located in Mexico City, Mexico, and Guadalajara, Mexico, were replaced by nodes located in Los Angeles, CA, in exhibiting outage conditions. By around 2:20 AM EDT, these outage conditions extended to nodes in Atlanta, GA, and Dallas, TX. This increase in affected nodes and locations appeared to coincide with a rise in the number of impacted downstream customers and partners. Fifteen minutes after appearing to clear, nodes located in Miami, FL, began exhibiting outage conditions. The outage was cleared around 3:10 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On August 4, UUNET Verizon, acquired by Verizon in 2006 and now operating as Verizon Business, experienced an outage that affected customers and partners across multiple regions, including the U.S., Singapore, Japan, Canada, South Korea, the Netherlands, Australia, Poland, and Hong Kong. The outage, which lasted 11 minutes, was first observed around 11:58 AM EDT, and initially centered on Verizon Business nodes in Washington, D.C. Three minutes into the outage the nodes located in Washington, D.C., were joined by nodes located in Newark, NJ, in exhibiting outage conditions. A further five minutes later the nodes located in Newark, NJ, were replaced by nodes located in Chicago, IL, in exhibiting outage conditions. The outage was cleared around 12:10 PM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet Report for July 28-Aug. 3

ThousandEyes reported 187 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of July 28 through August 3. That’s an increase of 18% from 158 outages from the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 88 outages, which is down 4% from 92 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages increased from 84 to 97 outages, a 15% increase compared to the week prior. In the U.S., however, ISP outages decreased from 44 to 38 outages, a 14% decrease.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages increased from 35 to 43 outages, a 23% increase compared to the week prior. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages increased slightly from 28 to 30 outages, a 7% increase.
• Collaboration app network outages: Both global and U.S. collaboration application network outages remained at zero recorded outages.

Two notable outages

On July 31, Crown Castle Fiber, a U.S.-based fiber infrastructure provider operating assets acquired from Lightower Fiber Networks in 2017, experienced an outage that impacted customers and downstream partners across multiple regions, including the U.S., Sweden, the U.K., the United Arab Emirates, Japan, Canada, Italy, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Spain, South Korea, Mexico, Australia, Brazil, Singapore, and Switzerland. The outage, which lasted a total of one hour and 19 minutes over a two-hour and 9-minute period, was first observed around 9:26 PM EDT and appeared to initially be centered on Lightower Fiber Networks nodes located in Boston, MA. Six minutes after appearing to clear, nodes located in Boston, MA, were replaced by nodes located in New York, NY, Philadelphia, PA, and Stamford, CT, in exhibiting outage conditions. Around 9:50 PM EDT, five minutes after appearing to clear, nodes located in Boston, MA, New York, NY, and Philadelphia, PA, once again began exhibiting outage conditions. A further 30 minutes into the outage, nodes located in Philadelphia, PA, appeared to clear and were replaced by nodes located in Newark, NJ, in exhibiting outage conditions. The outage was cleared around 11:35 PM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On July 29, Microsoft experienced an outage on its network that impacted some downstream partners and access to services running on Microsoft environments across multiple regions, including the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, Japan, Mexico, Costa Rica, Australia, France, Honduras, the U.K., Hong Kong, South Africa, Taiwan, Argentina, and Panama. The outage, lasting 19 minutes, was first observed around 2:05 AM EDT and appeared to initially center on Microsoft nodes located in Chicago, IL, and Newark, NJ. Around 5 minutes after first being observed, nodes located in Newark, NJ, were replaced by nodes located in Cleveland, OH, in exhibiting outage conditions. A further five minutes later, nodes located in Cleveland, OH, were replaced by nodes located Des Moines, IA, in exhibiting outage conditions. The outage was cleared around 2:25 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet Report for July 21-27

ThousandEyes reported 158 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of July 21-27. That’s a decrease of 27% from 216 outages from the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 92 outages, which is down 28% from 66 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages decreased from 127 to 84 outages, a 34% decrease compared to the week prior. Similarly in the U.S., ISP outages decreased from 68 to 44 outages, a 35% decrease.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages decreased from 37 to 35 outages, a 5% decrease compared to the week prior. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages decreased slightly from 29 to 28 outages, a 3% decrease.
• Collaboration app network outages: Both global and U.S. collaboration application network outages remained at zero recorded outages.

Two notable outages

On July 25, Zayo Group, a U.S. based Tier 1 carrier headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, experienced an outage that impacted some of its partners and customers across multiple regions, including the U.S. Canada, India, the U.K., South Africa, the Philippines, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Germany, Chile, Mexico, France, Japan, Colombia, Poland, Australia, Malaysia, Honduras, South Korea, Switzerland, Uruguay, Brazil, and Singapore. The outage, which lasted a total of 30 minutes over a fifty-minute period, was first observed around 12:25 AM EDT and appeared to initially be centered on Zayo nodes located in Washington, D.C., New York, NY, Dallas, TX, Toronto, Canada, Los Angeles, CA, and Ashburn, VA.  Around five minutes into the outage, the number of locations exhibiting outage conditions, expanded to include nodes located in Chicago, IL, and Atlanta, GA. This increase in the number of nodes and locations exhibiting outage conditions appeared to coincide with an increase in the number of impacted downstream partners. Around 15 minutes after appearing to clear, nodes located in Chicago, IL, once again appeared to exhibit outage conditions. The outage was cleared around 1:15 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On July 25, Cogent Communications, a multinational transit provider based in the U.S., experienced an outage that impacted multiple downstream providers as well as Cogent customers across various regions, including the U.S., Canada and the U.K. The outage, which lasted 19 minutes, was first observed around 12:35 AM EDT and appeared to center on Cogent nodes located in Washington, D.C. Around fifteen minutes after first being observed, the number of nodes located in Washington, D.C., exhibiting outage conditions appeared to increase. This rise in the number of nodes exhibiting outage conditions appeared to coincide with an increase in the number of impacted downstream partners and customers. The outage was resolved around 12:55 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet Report for July 14-20

ThousandEyes reported 216 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of July 14-20. That’s an increase of 44% in outages from the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 128 outages, which is up 94% from 66 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages increased from 80 to 127 outages, a 59% increase compared to the week prior. In the U.S., ISP outages more than doubled, rising from 33 to 68 outages, a 106% increase.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages increased from 28 to 37 outages, a 32% increase compared to the week prior. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages increased from 16 to 29 outages, an 81% increase.
• Collaboration app network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages increased from 28 to 37 outages, a 32% increase compared to the week prior. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages increased from 16 to 29 outages, an 81% increase.

Two notable outages

On July 14, Cloudflare experienced a DNS service outage, impacting users globally who relied on its public DNS resolver. The outage, first observed around 5:50 PM EDT, prevented affected users from resolving domain names and accessing websites and applications. Cloudflare confirmed that the incident resulted from an internal configuration error that caused their DNS public resolver service to become unreachable. The incident lasted approximately one hour, with service fully restored by 6:54 PM EDT after Cloudflare identified and fixed the configuration issue. Click here for an interactive view and here for a detailed analysis.

On July 17, GTT Communications, a Tier 1 provider headquartered in Tysons, VA, experienced an outage that impacted some of its partners and customers across multiple regions, including the U.S., Canada. Germany and Australia. The outage, which lasted 58 minutes, was first observed around 5:30 AM EDT and appeared to be centered on GTT nodes located in San Jose, CA.  The outage was cleared around 6:30 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet Report for July 7-13

ThousandEyes reported 150 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of July 7-13. That’s the same volume of outages as the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 66 outages, which is down 15% from 78 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages increased from 66 to 80 outages, a 21% increase compared to the week prior. In the U.S., ISP outages increased slightly from 30 to 33 outages, a 10% increase.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages decreased from 45 to 28 outages, a 38% decrease compared to the week prior. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages dropped from 33 to 16 outages, a 52% decrease.
• Collaboration app network outages: For the first time in eight weeks, two collaboration application network outages were recorded globally. In the U.S., collaboration application network outages remained at zero.

Two notable outages

On July 10, Hurricane Electric, a network transit provider based in Fremont, CA, experienced an outage that impacted customers and downstream partners across multiple regions, including the U.S., Mexico, Canada, Japan, Hong Kong, India, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Belgium, Bulgaria, Vietnam, and Thailand. The outage was first observed around 12:30 AM EDT and lasted a total of 30 minutes over a period of 50 minutes. The outage initially appeared to be centered on Hurricane Electric nodes located in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Frankfurt, Germany. Around twenty minutes into the outage, those nodes were joined by nodes located in Chicago, IL, in exhibiting outage conditions. Ten minutes after appearing to clear, nodes located in Singapore, and Frankfurt, Germany, once again began exhibiting outage conditions. The outage was cleared at around 1:30 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On July 8, Unitas Global, a US-based network transit provider that merged with PacketFabric in 2023 and is now operating as PacketFabric, experienced an outage that impacted customers and downstream partners across multiple regions, including the U.S., Turkey, Canada, Singapore, the Netherlands, India, Switzerland, Germany, Malaysia, Greece, and France. The outage was first observed around 8:11 PM EDT and lasted a total of 34 minutes over a period of 54 minutes. The outage initially appeared to be centered on Unitas Global nodes located in Washington, D.C. Around six minutes into the outage, the nodes located in Washington, D.C., appeared to clear and were replaced by nodes located in New York, NY, in exhibiting outage conditions. Five minutes after appearing to clear, nodes located in New York, NY, and Washington, D.C., once again began exhibiting outage conditions. This rise in the number of nodes and locations exhibiting outage conditions appeared to coincide with an increase in the number of impacted downstream partners and customers. Around five minutes further on, the nodes located in New York, NY, and Washington, D.C., were temporarily replaced by nodes located in London, England, in exhibiting outage conditions. Five minutes later, the nodes located in London, England, were replaced by nodes located in New York, NY, in exhibiting outage conditions. The outage was cleared at around 9:05 PM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet Report for June 30-July 6

ThousandEyes reported 150 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of June 30-July 6. That’s a decrease of 28% from 208 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 78 outages, which is down 39% from 128 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages dropped from 120 to 66 outages, a 45% decrease compared to the week prior. In the U.S., ISP outages decreased from 67 to 30 outages, a 55% decrease.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages decreased from 49 to 45 outages, an 8% decrease compared to the week prior. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages decreased slightly from 35 to 33 outages, a 6% decrease.
• Collaboration app network outages: Both globally and in the U.S., collaboration application network outages remained at zero outages for the seventh week in a row.

Two notable outages

On June 30, Lumen, a U.S. based Tier 1 carrier (previously known as CenturyLink), experienced an outage that affected customers and downstream partners across multiple regions including the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. The outage, lasting a total of one hour and 18 minutes over a period of one hour and 25 minutes, was first observed around 6:20 AM EDT and appeared to initially be centered on Lumen nodes located in Houston, TX, and Dallas, TX.  Around fifteen minutes into the outage, nodes located in Houston, TX, and Dallas, TX, were joined by nodes located in Atlanta, GA, in exhibiting outage conditions. Five minutes after appearing to clear, nodes located in Dallas, TX, once again appeared to exhibit outage conditions. The outage was cleared around 7:45 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On June 30, Amazon experienced some disruption that impacted some of its partners and customers across multiple regions, including the U.S., Mexico, the Philippines, Vietnam, the Netherlands, France, and Brazil. The outage lasted a total of 47 minutes within a three hour and 43-minute period and was first observed around 12:42 PM EDT. It appeared to center on Amazon nodes located in Ashburn, VA. The outage was cleared around 4:25 PM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet Report for June 23-29

ThousandEyes reported 208 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of June 23-29. That’s a decrease of 17% from 252 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 128 outages, which is up 20% from 107 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages decreased from 141 to 120 outages, a 15% decrease compared to the week prior. In the U.S., however, ISP outages increased from 48 to 67 outages, a 40% increase.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages increased from 44 to 49 outages, an 11% increase compared to the week prior. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages increased from 32 to 35 outages, a 9% increase.
• Collaboration app network outages: Both globally and in the U.S., collaboration application network outages remained at zero outages for the sixth week in a row.

Two notable outages

On June 24, Zayo Group, a U.S. based Tier 1 carrier headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, experienced an outage that impacted some of its partners and customers across multiple regions, including the U.S. and Canada. The outage lasted a total of 42 minutes within a one-hour period and was first observed around 3:10 AM EDT. It appeared to center on Zayo Group nodes located in Seattle, WA. Five minutes after appearing to clear, nodes located in Seattle, WA, once again appeared to exhibit outage conditions. The outage was cleared around 4:10 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On June 25, UUNET Verizon, acquired by Verizon in 2006 and now operating as Verizon Business, experienced an outage that affected customers and partners across multiple regions, including the U.S., India, Japan, the U.K., Singapore, Germany, the Philippines, Australia, and Hong Kong. The outage lasted a total of 20 minutes over a 30-minute period. The outage was first observed around 1:10 PM EDT and initially centered on Verizon Business nodes in Los Angeles, CA. Around 3 minutes into the outage, the nodes located in Los Angeles, CA, were joined by nodes located in Phoenix, AZ, and Gilbert, AZ, in exhibiting outage conditions. This increase in affected nodes and locations appeared to coincide with a rise in the number of impacted regions, downstream customers, and partners. Around six minutes after appearing to clear, nodes located in Los Angeles, CA, once again began exhibiting outage conditions. The outage was cleared around 1:40 PM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet Report for June 16-22

ThousandEyes reported 252 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of June 16-22. That’s a decrease of 33% from 376 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 107 outages, which is down 21% from 135 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages dropped from 285 to 141 outages, a 51% decrease compared to the week prior. In the U.S., ISP outages decreased from 91 to 48 outages, a 47% decrease.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages increased from 27 to 44 outages, a 63% increase compared to the week prior. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages increased from 17 to 32 outages, an 88% increase.
• Collaboration app network outages: Both globally and in the U.S., collaboration application network outages remained at zero outages for the fifth week in a row.

Two notable outages

On June 17, Hurricane Electric, a network transit provider based in Fremont, CA, experienced an outage that impacted customers and downstream partners across the U.S. The outage was first observed around 3:55 PM EDT and lasted a total of 18 minutes over a 50-minute period. The outage initially appeared to be centered on Hurricane Electric nodes located in Dallas, TX. Around 11 minutes after first being observed, the number of nodes located in Dallas, TX, appeared to rise. This increase in the number of nodes exhibiting outage conditions appeared to coincide with an increase in the number of impacted downstream partners. The outage was cleared at around 4:45 PM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On June 20, Cogent Communications, a multinational transit provider based in the U.S., experienced an outage that impacted multiple downstream providers as well as Cogent customers across various regions, including the U.S., Ireland, the U.K., India, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Luxembourg, Belgium, Austria, Italy, Canada, Switzerland, South Africa, Brazil, Australia, Qatar, Romania, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, Sweden, Poland, France, and Germany. The outage, which lasted one hour and 12 minutes, was first observed around 8:20 AM EDT and initially appeared to center on Cogent nodes located in London, England, and Paris, France. Around ten minutes after first being observed, the nodes located in London, England, and Paris, France, were joined by nodes located in York, England, in exhibiting outage conditions. Thirty-five minutes further into the outage, nodes located in Slough, England, joined the other nodes in exhibiting outage conditions. After a further ten minutes, all nodes except those located in London, England, and York, England, appeared to clear. The outage was resolved around 9:35 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet report for June 9-15

ThousandEyes reported 376 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of June 9-15. That’s an increase of 24% from 304 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 135 outages, which is up 75% from 77 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages increased from 233 to 285 outages, a 22% increase compared to the week prior. In the U.S., ISP outages increased from 32 to 91 outages, a 184% jump.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages remained the same as the week prior, recording 27 outages. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages decreased from 18 to 17 outages, a 6% decrease.
• Collaboration app network outages: Both globally and in the U.S., collaboration application network outages remained at zero outages for the fourth week in a row.

Two notable outages

On June 13, AT&T experienced an outage on their network that impacted AT&T customers and partners across the U.S. The outage, lasting around 14 minutes, was first observed around 2:00 AM EDT, appearing to center on AT&T nodes located in Dallas, TX. The outage was cleared at around 2:15 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On June 12, Cogent Communications, a multinational transit provider based in the U.S., experienced an outage that impacted multiple downstream providers and customers across the U.S. The outage lasted a total of forty minutes, distributed across a series of occurrences over a period of around 2 hours. The first occurrence was observed around 8:01 PM EDT and initially seemed to be centered on Cogent nodes located in San Francisco, CA. Around 10 minutes after first being observed, nodes in San Francisco, CA, were joined by nodes located in San Jose, CA, in exhibiting outage conditions again. Five minutes after appearing to clear, nodes located in San Jose, CA, once again began exhibiting outage conditions. A further thirty minutes later, nodes located in San Jose, CA, were once again joined by nodes located in San Francisco, CA, in exhibiting outage conditions. The outage was cleared around 10:00 PM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet report for June 2-8

ThousandEyes reported 304 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of June 2-8. That’s a decrease of 8% from 241 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 77 outages, which is down 9% from 84 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages increased from 165 to 233 outages, a 41% increase compared to the week prior. In the U.S., ISP outages decreased slightly from 35 to 32 outages, a 9% decrease.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages decreased from 30 to 27 outages, a 10% decrease compared to the week prior. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages remained the same as the week prior, recording 18 outages.
• Collaboration app network outages: Both globally and in the U.S., collaboration application network outages remained at zero outages for the third week in a row. 

Two notable outages

On June 4, Cogent Communications, a multinational transit provider based in the U.S., experienced an outage that impacted multiple downstream providers as well as Cogent customers across various regions, including the U.S., Mexico, the U.K., the Netherlands, Spain, Germany, Hong Kong, Brazil, and Canada. The outage, which lasted 11 minutes, was first observed around 12:16 AM EDT and initially appeared to center on Cogent nodes located in Mexico City, Mexico, and Los Angeles, CA. Around five minutes after first being observed, the nodes located in Mexico City, Mexico, appeared to clear, while nodes located in Los Angeles, CA, were joined by nodes located in Washington, D.C., and Dallas, TX, in exhibiting outage conditions. This rise in the number of nodes and locations exhibiting outage conditions appeared to coincide with an increase in the number of impacted downstream partners and customers. A further five minutes into the outage, the nodes located in Los Angeles, CA, Washington, D.C., and Dallas, TX, appeared to clear and were replaced by nodes located in McAllen, TX, and Monterrey, Mexico, in exhibiting outage conditions. The outage was resolved around 12:30 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On June 3, Microsoft experienced an outage on its network that impacted some downstream partners and access to services running on Microsoft environments within the U.S. The outage, lasting a total of 5 minutes, over a 21-minute period, was first observed around 12:04 PM EDT and appeared to initially center on Microsoft nodes located in New York, NY. Around 2 minutes after first being observed, nodes located in New York, NY, were replaced by nodes located in Newark, NJ, in exhibiting outage conditions. Twelve minutes after appearing to clear, nodes located in Chicago, IL, began exhibiting outage conditions. The outage was cleared around 12:25 PM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet report for May 26-June 1

ThousandEyes reported 241 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of May 26-June 1. That’s a decrease of 37% from 383 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 84 outages, which is down 43% from 147 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages dropped from 293 to 165 outages, a 44% decrease compared to the week prior. In the U.S., ISP outages decreased from 96 to 35 outages, a 64% drop.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages slightly decreased from 31 to 30 outages, a 3% decrease compared to the week prior. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages decreased from 21 to 18 outages, a 14% decrease.
• Collaboration app network outages: Both globally and in the U.S., collaboration application network outages remained at zero outages for the second week in a row. 

Two notable outages

On May 29, Arelion (formerly known as Telia Carrier), a global Tier 1 provider headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, experienced an outage that impacted customers and downstream partners across multiple regions, including the U.S., India, Singapore, Germany, Spain, the U.K., Malaysia, Mexico, South Africa, the Czech Republic, Peru, Chile, Brazil, Indonesia, Italy, Canada, the Philippines, Sweden, Portugal, Hungary, Australia, Argentina, Denmark, Hong Kong, Thailand, Finland, Norway, and Japan. The disruption, which lasted 31 minutes, was first observed around 6:32 PM EDT and appeared to initially center on nodes located in Singapore.  Around 30 minutes after first being observed the nodes located in Singapore were joined by nodes located in Los Angeles, CA, and Minnesota, in exhibiting outage condition. This rise in nodes and locations exhibiting outage conditions also appeared to coincide with an increase in the number of downstream customers, partners, and regions impacted. The outage was cleared around 7:05 PM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On May 28, Cloudflare, a U.S. headquartered web infrastructure and website security company that provides content delivery network services, suffered an interruption that impacted its customers across the U.S. The outage, lasting 12 minutes over a period of 28 minutes, was first observed at around 8:22 PM EDT and appeared to center on Cloudflare nodes located in Chicago, IL. Ten minutes after appearing to clear, the nodes located in Chicago, IL, once again began exhibiting outage conditions, and were briefly joined by nodes located in Nebraska. The outage was cleared around 8:50 PM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet report for May 19-25

ThousandEyes reported 383 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of May 19-25. That’s a decrease of 29% from 536 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 147 outages, which is down 1% from 149 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages decreased from 432 to 293 outages, a 32% decrease compared to the week prior. In the U.S., ISP outages increased from 84 to 96 outages, a 14% increase.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages decreased from 38 to 31 outages, an 18% decrease compared to the week prior. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages decreased from 24 to 21 outages, a 13% decrease.
• Collaboration app network outages: Both globally and in the U.S., collaboration application network outages dropped down to zero, down from one outage respectively the week prior. 

Two notable outages

On May 22, Cogent Communications, a multinational transit provider based in the U.S., experienced an outage that impacted multiple downstream providers as well as Cogent customers across various regions, including the U.S., Canada, Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, Germany, Brazil, South Korea, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Ireland, the U.K., Poland, and Switzerland. The outage, which lasted a total of 2 hours and 34 minutes over a three-hour and 10-minute period, was first observed around 11:30 PM EDT and initially appeared to center on Cogent nodes located in Denver, CO, and San Jose, CA. Around ten minutes after first being observed, nodes located in Sacramento, CA, San Francisco, CA, and Salt Lake City, UT also began to exhibit outage conditions. A further five minutes into the outage, the nodes located in Sacramento, CA, and Salt Lake City, UT, appeared to clear and were replaced by nodes located in Frankfurt, Germany, Singapore, and Tokyo, Japan, in exhibiting outage conditions. Around twenty minutes later, nodes exhibiting outage conditions had expanded to include nodes located in San Jose, CA, Oakland, CA, Salt Lake City, UT, New York, NY, Newark, NJ, San Francisco, CA, and Washington, D.C. This rise in the number of nodes and locations exhibiting outage conditions appeared to coincide with an increase in the number of impacted downstream partners, and customers. Around 30 minutes after appearing to clear, nodes located in Denver, CO, once again appeared to exhibit outage conditions. Around twenty minutes later, the nodes located in Denver, CO, were joined first by nodes loaded in Chicago, IL, and then Dallas, TX, in exhibiting outage conditions. The outage was resolved around 2:40 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On May 22, Amazon experienced a disruption that impacted some of its partners and customers across multiple regions, including the U.S., Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia, Brazil, and the Netherlands. The outage, lasting 13 minutes, was first observed around 12:00 AM EDT, and appeared to be centered on Amazon nodes located in Ashburn, VA. Around five minutes after first being observed the number of nodes exhibiting outage conditions in Ashburn, VA, increased. This increase in affected nodes appeared to coincide with an increase in the number of impacted downstream customers and partners. The outage was cleared around 12:15 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet report for May 12-18

ThousandEyes reported 536 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of May 12-18. That’s an increase of 8% from 495 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 149 outages, which is up 54% from 97 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages increased from 410 to 432 outages, a 5% increase compared to the week prior. In the U.S., ISP outages increased from 52 to 84 outages, a 62% increase.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages increased from 32 to 38 outages, a 19% increase compared to the week prior. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages increased from 20 to 24 outages, a 20% increase.
• Collaboration app network outages: Globally, collaboration application network outages dropped from two outages to one outage. In the U.S., there was one collaboration application network outage, up from zero the week prior. 

Two notable outages

On May 16, AT&T experienced an outage on their network that impacted AT&T customers and partners across the U.S. The outage, lasting around 43 minutes, was first observed around 6:55 AM EDT, appearing to center on AT&T nodes located in Dallas, TX. Fifteen minutes after first being observed, the number of nodes exhibiting outage conditions located in Dallas, TX, appeared to drop. This decrease appeared to coincide with a drop in the number of impacted partners and customers. The outage was cleared at around 7:40 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On May 13, GTT Communications, a Tier 1 provider headquartered in Tysons, VA, experienced an outage that impacted some of its partners and customers across multiple regions, including the U.S., India, the U.K., Germany, Singapore, Japan, and Spain. The outage, which lasted 14 minutes, was first observed around 3:30 AM EDT and appeared to be centered on GTT nodes located in Los Angeles, CA. Around five minutes into the outage, the number of nodes located in Los Angeles, CA, appeared to rise. This increase appeared to coincide with an increase in the number of impacted downstream partners. The outage was cleared around 3:45 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet report for May 5-11

ThousandEyes reported 495 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of May 5-11. That’s an increase of 11% from 444 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 97 outages, which is up 2% from 95 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages increased from 361 to 410 outages, a 14% increase compared to the week prior. In the U.S., ISP outages slightly decreased from 54 to 52 outages, a 4% decrease.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages increased from 21 to 32 outages, a 52% increase compared to the week prior. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages doubled from 10 to 20 outages.
• Collaboration app network outages: Globally, collaboration application network outages dropped from four to two outages. In the U.S., collaboration application network outages dropped to zero.

Two notable outages

On May 5, GTT Communications, a Tier 1 provider headquartered in Tysons, VA, experienced an outage that affected some of its partners and customers across multiple regions including the U.S., the Netherlands, Germany, and Japan. The disruption, which lasted a total of 13 minutes over a 20-minute period, was first observed around 2:45 PM EDT and appeared to center on GTT nodes in Los Angeles, CA. Five minutes after appearing to clear, nodes located in Los Angeles, CA, once again began exhibiting outage conditions. The outage was cleared around 3:05 PM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On May 6, Microsoft experienced an outage on its network that impacted some downstream partners and access to services running on Microsoft environments in multiple regions, including the U.S., Canada, Colombia, Peru, the U.K., Brazil, Vietnam, India, and Mexico. The outage, which lasted one hour and 38 minutes, was first observed around 9:00 AM EDT and appeared to initially center on Microsoft nodes located in Dallas, TX. Around 20 minutes after first being observed, nodes located in Dallas, TX, were joined by nodes located in San Antonio, TX, Arlington, TX, and Houston, TX, in exhibiting outage conditions. Around 25 minutes further into the outage, the nodes located in Houston, TX, appeared to clear and were replaced by nodes located in Des Moines, IA, in exhibiting outage conditions. A further twenty-five minutes in, the nodes located in Arlington, TX, appeared to clear, replaced by nodes located in Atlanta, GA, and Newark, NJ, in exhibiting outage conditions. The outage was cleared around 10:40 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet report for April 28-May 4

ThousandEyes reported 444 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of April 28-May 4. That’s an increase of 28% from 348 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 95 outages, which is up 38% from 69 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages increased from 273 to 361 outages, a 32% increase compared to the week prior. In the U.S., ISP outages increased from 32 to 54 outages, a 69% increase.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages increased from 13 to 21 outages, a 62% increase compared to the week prior. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages jumped from one to 10.
• Collaboration app network outages: Both globally and in the U.S., collaboration application network outages remained the same as the week prior, recording 4 outages.

Two notable outages

On April 29, NTT America, a global Tier 1 provider and subsidiary of NTT Global, experienced a series of outages over a one-hour and 15-minute period. These outages impacted multiple downstream providers and customers across various regions, including the U.S., Philippines, Japan, Hong Kong, Argentina, Thailand, Australia, Singapore, South Korea, Germany, Canada, Mexico, and Brazil. The outage, which lasted a total of 50 minutes, was first observed around 10:40 AM EDT and appeared to be centered on NTT nodes located in Ashburn, VA. Approximately ten minutes after first being observed, the number of nodes exhibiting outage conditions in Ashburn, VA, increased. This increase in affected nodes appeared to coincide with an increase in the number of impacted downstream customers and partners. The outage was cleared around 11:55 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On May 1, UUNET Verizon, acquired by Verizon in 2006 and now operating as Verizon Business, experienced an outage that affected customers and partners across multiple regions, including the U.S., the U.K., Germany, the Netherlands, Puerto Rico, Switzerland, Mexico, Indonesia, Japan, France, Ireland, Colombia, India, South Korea, the Philippines, Switzerland, Finland, and Sweden. The outage lasted a total of 26 minutes over a 50-minute period. The outage was first observed around 12:55 AM EDT and initially centered on Verizon Business nodes in Boston, MA. Around 19 minutes after appearing to clear, Verizon nodes located in Washington, D.C., began exhibiting outage conditions. Five minutes further into the outage the nodes located in Washington, D.C., were joined by nodes located in New York, NY, Cleveland, OH, Dallas, TX, Atlanta, GA, Brooklyn, NY, Newark, NJ, and Arlington, VA, in exhibiting outage conditions. This increase in affected nodes and locations appeared to coincide with a rise in the number of impacted downstream customers and partners. The outage was cleared around 1:55 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet report for April 21-27

ThousandEyes reported 348 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of April 21-27. That’s an increase of 13% from 309 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 69 outages, which is equal to the number of U.S. outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages increased from 238 to 273 outages, a 15% increase compared to the week prior. In the U.S., however, ISP outages decreased from 37 to 32 outages, a 14% decrease.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages dropped from 17 to 13 outages, a 24% drop compared to the week prior. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages dropped down from four to one.
• Collaboration app network outages: Globally, collaboration application network outages increased from three to four outages. In the U.S., collaboration application network outages increased from two to four outages.

Two notable outages

On April 23, GTT Communications, a Tier 1 provider headquartered in Tysons, VA, experienced an outage that impacted some of its partners and customers across multiple regions, including the U.S., Germany, and the Netherlands. The outage, which lasted 8 minutes, was first observed around 4:45 AM EDT and appeared to initially be centered on GTT nodes located in San Francisco, CA. Around five minutes into the outage, those nodes appeared to clear and were replaced by nodes located in New York NY, in exhibiting outage conditions. This change appeared to coincide with an increase in the number of impacted downstream partners. The outage was cleared around 4:55 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On April 25, Zayo Group, a U.S. based Tier 1 carrier headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, experienced an outage that impacted some of its partners and customers across multiple regions, including the U.S. and Israel. The outage, which lasted 6 minutes, was first observed around 1:10 AM EDT and appeared to be centered on Zayo nodes located in Dallas, TX.  Around five minutes into the outage, the number of nodes located in Dallas, TX, exhibiting outage conditions increased. This increase appeared to coincide with an increase in the number of impacted downstream partners. The outage was cleared around 1:20 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet report for April 14-20

ThousandEyes reported 309 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of April 14-20. That’s a decrease of 45% from 559 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 69 outages, which is down 67% from 212 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages decreased from 378 to 238 outages, a 37% decrease compared to the week prior. In the U.S., ISP outages decreased from 106 to 37 outages, a 65% decrease.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages decreased from 99 to 17 outages, an 83% drop compared to the week prior. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages dropped from 59 to 4 outages, a 93% drop.
• Collaboration app network outages: Globally, collaboration application network outages decreased from four to three outages. In the U.S., collaboration application network outages fell from four to two outages.

Two notable outages

On April 16, Zoom experienced a global outage that affected users worldwide. The issue was first observed around 2:25 PM EDT and lasted approximately two hours, with the problem resolved by 4:12 PM EDT. However, some disruptions continued to be observed until 4:30 PM EDT. The outage was caused by a problem at the DNS layer, which impacted connectivity to the zoom.us domain and disrupted all associated services. Click here for an interactive view, and here for a detailed analysis.

On April 17, GTT Communications, a Tier 1 provider headquartered in Tysons, VA, experienced an outage that affected some of its partners and customers across the U.S. The disruption, which lasted a total of 16 minutes over a 34-minute period, was first observed around 12:16 AM EDT and appeared to center on GTT nodes in Miami, FL. Ten minutes after appearing to clear, nodes located in Miami, FL, once again began exhibiting outage conditions. The outage was cleared around 12:50 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet report for April 7-13

ThousandEyes reported 559 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of April 7-13. That’s an increase of 38% from 404 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 212 outages, which is up 41% from 150 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages increased from 281 to 378 outages, a 35% increase compared to the week prior. In the U.S., ISP outages increased from 63 to 106 outages, a 68% increase.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages increased from 71 to 99 outages, a 39% increase compared to the week prior. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages increased from 55 to 59 outages, a 7% increase.
• Collaboration app network outages: Both globally and in the U.S., collaboration application network outages went from zero to four outages.

Two notable outages

On April 8, Arelion (formerly known as Telia Carrier), a global Tier 1 provider headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, experienced an outage that impacted customers and downstream partners across multiple regions, including the U.S., Luxembourg, Germany, Argentina, Sweden, Canada, and Singapore. The disruption, which lasted a total of 57 minutes over a one hour and 21-minute period, was first observed around 12:14 AM EDT and appeared to initially center on nodes located in Boston, MA. Fifteen minutes after appearing to clear, nodes located in Los Angeles, CA, began exhibiting outage conditions. By around 1:10 AM EDT, these outage conditions extended to nodes in Newark, NJ, and Ashburn, VA. This increase appeared to coincide with a rise in the number of impacted downstream customers and partners. Ten minutes later, the nodes in Los Angeles, CA, were replaced by nodes located in Boston, MA, and New York, NY, in exhibiting outage conditions. The outage was cleared around 1:35 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On April 13, GTT Communications, a Tier 1 provider headquartered in Tysons, VA, experienced an outage that impacted some of its partners and customers across multiple regions, including the U.S., Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, and Japan. The outage, which lasted 16 minutes, was first observed around 11:35 AM EDT and appeared to initially be centered on GTT nodes located in Chicago, IL, and New York, NY.  Around ten minutes into the outage, the number of nodes located in Chicago, IL, exhibiting outage conditions increased. While nodes in all other locations had appeared to clear by this time, this increase in the number of nodes exhibiting outage conditions located in Chicago, IL, appeared to coincide with an increase in the number of impacted downstream partners. The outage was cleared around 11:55 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet report for March 31-April 6

ThousandEyes reported 404 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of March 31-April 6. That’s a decrease of 23% from 525 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 150 outages, which is down 29% from 212 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages decreased from 293 to 281 outages, a 4% decrease compared to the week prior. In the U.S., ISP outages increased slightly from 62 to 63, a 2% gain.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages decreased significantly, dropping 57% from 165 to 71 outages. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages decreased from 109 to 55 outages, a 50% decrease.
• Collaboration app network outages: Both globally and in the U.S., collaboration application network outages dropped to zero outages, down from 1 outage respectively the week prior.

Two notable outages

On April 2, Amazon experienced some disruption that impacted some of its partners and customers across multiple regions, including the U.S., Mexico, the U.K., Germany, Colombia, Brazil, and Egypt. The outage lasted a total of 19 minutes within a 50-minute period and was first observed around 8:30 PM EDT. It appeared to center on Amazon nodes located in Ashburn, VA. The outage was cleared around 9:20 PM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On April 3, AT&T experienced an outage on their network that impacted AT&T customers and partners across the U.S. The outage lasted approximately 19 minutes and was first observed around 1:35 AM PM EDT, appearing to center on AT&T nodes located in Cambridge, MA. Ten minutes after first being observed, the number of nodes exhibiting outage conditions located in Cambridge, MA, appeared to rise. This increase in nodes exhibiting outage conditions appeared to coincide with a rise in the number of impacted partners and customers. The outage was cleared at around 1:55 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet report for March 24-30

ThousandEyes reported 525 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of March 24-30. That’s a decrease of 21% from 664 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 212 outages, which is down 26% from 287 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages decreased from 316 to 293 outages, a 7% decrease compared to the week prior. In the U.S., ISP outages decreased slightly from 63 to 62, a 2% decrease.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages dropped from 258 to 165 outages. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages decreased from 162 to 109 outages.
• Collaboration app network outages: Both globally and in the U.S., collaboration application network outages dropped from eight outages to one.

Two notable outages

On March 24, Zayo Group, a U.S. based Tier 1 carrier headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, experienced an outage that impacted some of its partners and customers across multiple regions, including the U.S., Canada, Ireland, South Africa, Brazil, and Colombia. The outage lasted a total of 11 minutes within a 25-minute period and was first observed around 1:00 AM EDT. It appeared to center on Zayo Group nodes located in San Antonio, TX. Six minutes after appearing to clear, nodes located in San Antonio, TX, once again appeared to exhibit outage conditions. The outage was cleared around 1:25 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On March 24, Cogent Communications, a multinational transit provider based in the U.S., experienced an outage that impacted multiple downstream providers as well as Cogent customers across various regions, including the U.S., Canada, Spain, Ireland, Singapore, Qatar, the U.K., Germany, South Korea, Switzerland, India, Belgium, France, and Japan. The outage, which lasted 10 minutes, was first observed around 1:00 AM EDT and initially appeared to center on Cogent nodes located in Washington, D.C., and Denver, CO. Around two minutes after first being observed, the nodes located in Denver, CO, appeared to clear, while nodes located in Washington, D.C., were joined by nodes located in Los Angeles, CA, Ashburn, VA, and Phoenix, AZ, in exhibiting outage conditions. This rise appeared to coincide with an increase in the number of impacted downstream partners, and customers. The outage was resolved around 1:15 AM EDT.  Click here for an interactive view.

Internet report for March 17-23

ThousandEyes reported 664 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of March 17-23. That’s up a whopping 76% from 378 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 287 outages, which is up 86% from 154 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages increased from 237 to 316 outages, a 33% increase compared to the week prior. In the U.S., however, ISP outages decreased slightly from 65 to 63, a 3% decrease.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages jumped from 98 to 258 outages. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages more than doubled, increasing from 66 to 162 outages.
• Collaboration app network outages: Both globally and in the U.S., collaboration application network outages jumped from zero to 8 outages.

Two notable outages

On March 20, Lumen, a U.S. based Tier 1 carrier, experienced an outage that affected customers and downstream partners across multiple regions, including the U.S., Australia, the U.K., Brazil, Germany, Spain, Colombia, Mexico, South Africa, and the Netherlands. The outage, lasting a total of 49 minutes, over a period of 55 minutes, was first observed around 12:40 AM EDT and appeared to initially be centered on Lumen nodes located in New York, NY.  Around five minutes into the outage, those nodes were joined by nodes located in Newark, NJ, in exhibiting outage conditions. Around five minutes later, in the same two regions, there was an increase in nodes exhibiting outage conditions. This rise appeared to coincide with an increase in the number of impacted downstream partners and customers. Around forty-five minutes after first being observed, all nodes appeared to clear, however five minutes later, nodes located in New York, NY, appeared to exhibit outage conditions once again. The outage was cleared around 1:45 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On March 21, Cogent Communications, a multinational transit provider based in the U.S., experienced an outage that impacted multiple downstream providers as well as Cogent customers across various regions, including the U.S., Mexico, Luxembourg, the U.K., Spain, Australia, Singapore, Japan, Mexico, Ireland, Poland, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, Peru, Ghana, Portugal, Germany, Turkey, Switzerland, Qatar, India, and Portugal. The outage, which lasted 13 minutes, was first observed around 6:35 AM EDT and initially appeared to center on Cogent nodes located in Washington, D.C. Around ten minutes after first being observed, those nodes were joined by nodes located in New York, NY, and Atlanta, GA, in exhibiting outage conditions. This rise appeared to coincide with an increase in the number of impacted downstream partners, and customers. The outage was resolved around 6:50 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet report for March 10-16

ThousandEyes reported 378 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of March 10-16. That’s down 11% from 425 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 154 outages, which is down 23% from 199 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages increased from 219 to 237 outages, an 8% increase compared to the week prior. In the U.S., ISP outages decreased from 81 to 65, a 20% decrease.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages decreased from 111 to 98 outages. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages decreased from 69 to 66 outages.
• Collaboration app network outages: Both globally and in the U.S., there were zero collaboration application network outages.

Two notable outages

On March 13, Time Warner Cable, a U.S.-based ISP, experienced a disruption that affected numerous customers and partners across the U.S. The outage, lasting 47 minutes, was first observed around 1:00 AM EDT. Initially it appeared to be centered on Time Warner Cable nodes in New York, NY, and Dallas, TX. Five minutes into the outage, those nodes were joined by nodes located in Houston, TX, in exhibiting outage conditions. Five minutes later, all nodes except those located in Dallas, TX, appeared to clear. The outage was cleared around 1:50 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On March 15, Lumen, a U.S. based Tier 1 carrier, experienced an outage that affected customers and downstream partners across the U.S. The outage, lasting a total of 53 minutes over a one-hour period, was first observed around 3:15 AM EDT and appeared to be centered on Lumen nodes located in Salt Lake City, UT. Forty-nine minutes into the outage, the Salt Lake City nodes appeared to clear before exhibiting outage conditions again about five minutes later. The outage was cleared around 4:15 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet report for March 3-9

ThousandEyes reported 425 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of March 3-9. That’s down 5% from 447 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 199 outages, which is up 5% from 189 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages decreased from 261 to 219 outages, a 16% decrease compared to the week prior. In the U.S., ISP outages increased from 73 to 81, an 11% increase.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages decreased from 120 to 111 outages. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages decreased from 82 to 69 outages.
• Collaboration app network outages: Globally, collaboration application network outages increased from zero to two outages. In the U.S., collaboration application network outages remained at zero for the second week in a row.

Two notable outages

On March 3, Microsoft experienced an outage on its network that impacted some downstream partners and access to services running on Microsoft environments in multiple regions, including the U.S., Canada, Costa Rica, Egypt, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Sweden, Brazil, Singapore, India, and Mexico. The outage, which lasted a total of one hour and 22 minutes over a two-hour period, was first observed around 11:05 AM EST and appeared to initially center on Microsoft nodes located in Toronto, Canada, and Cleveland, OH. Around 20 minutes after appearing to clear the nodes located in Toronto, Canada, and Cleveland, OH, were joined by nodes located in Newark, NJ, in exhibiting outage conditions. A further ten minutes later, nodes located in Newark, NJ, were replaced by nodes located in New York, NY, in exhibiting outage conditions. Around ten minutes further into the outage, the nodes located in New York, NY, appeared to clear and were replaced by nodes located in Los Angeles, CA, and Des Moines, IA, in exhibiting outage conditions. Around fifty-five minutes after first being observed, nodes located in Los Angeles, CA, and Des Moines, IA, appeared to clear and were replaced by nodes located in Hamburg, Germany, in exhibiting outage conditions. Five minutes later, the nodes located in Hamburg, Germany, were replaced by nodes located in Des Moines, IA. A further twenty-five minutes later, the nodes located in Des Moines, IA, were replaced by nodes located in Paris, France, before themselves clearing five minutes later, leaving just nodes located in Toronto, Canada, and Cleveland, OH, exhibiting outage conditions. Fifteen minutes after appearing to clear, nodes located in Cleveland, OH, and New York, NY, once again appeared to exhibit outage conditions. The outage was cleared around 1:05 PM EST. Click here for an interactive view.

On March 5, Arelion, a global Tier 1 provider headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, experienced an outage that impacted customers and downstream partners across multiple regions, including the U.S., Japan, the Netherlands, Brazil, Australia, Costa Rica, the U.K., Colombia, and Germany. The disruption, which lasted 35 minutes, was first observed around 2:10 AM EST and appeared to center on nodes located in Ashburn, VA.  Around 30 minutes after first being observed, the number of nodes exhibiting outage conditions located in Ashburn, VA, appeared to increase. This rise in nodes exhibiting outage conditions also appeared to coincide with an increase in the number of downstream customers, partners, and regions impacted. The outage was cleared around 2:50 AM EST. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet report for Feb. 24-March 2

ThousandEyes reported 447 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of Feb. 24-March 2. That’s up 13% from 397 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 189 outages, which is down 5% from 199 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages increased from 190 to 261 outages, a 37% increase compared to the week prior. In the U.S., ISP outages increased from 64 to 73, a 14% increase.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages decreased from 137 to 120 outages. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages decreased from 96 to 82 outages.
• Collaboration app network outages: Both globally and in the U.S., collaboration application network outages dropped back down to zero.

Two notable outages

On February 28, Cogent Communications, a multinational transit provider based in the U.S., experienced an outage that impacted multiple downstream providers as well as Cogent customers across various regions, including the U.S., Japan, the Philippines, the U.K., Romania, Thailand, South Korea, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Australia, Germany, Mexico, the Netherlands, South Africa, France, Luxembourg, India, Singapore, and Canada. The outage, which lasted 29 minutes, was first observed around 1:05 AM EST and initially appeared to center on Cogent nodes located in Los Angeles, CA, and San Jose, CA. Around five minutes after first being observed, the nodes located in Los Angeles, CA, appeared to clear and were replaced by nodes located in Washington, D.C., in exhibiting outage conditions. The outage was resolved around 1:25 AM EST. Click here for an interactive view.

On February 24, Arelion (formerly known as Telia Carrier), a global Tier 1 provider headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, experienced an outage that impacted customers and downstream partners across multiple regions, including the U.S., India, France, Ireland, Spain, Kenya, Singapore, the Netherlands, Mexico, Belgium, Romania, Germany, New Zealand, Hungary, Thailand, Australia, and Hong Kong. The disruption, which lasted a total of 18 minutes, was first observed around 1:00 PM EST and appeared to initially center on nodes located in Los Angeles, CA. Ten minutes after first being observed the nodes located in Los Angeles, CA appeared to clear, and were replaced by nodes located in Ashburn, VA, in exhibiting outage conditions. A further five minutes later, the number of nodes exhibiting outage conditions located in Ashburn, VA, appeared to increase. This rise in nodes exhibiting outage conditions also appeared to coincide with an increase in the number of downstream customers, partners, and regions impacted. The outage was cleared around 1:20 PM EST. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet report for Feb. 17-23

ThousandEyes reported 397 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of Feb. 17-23. That’s nearly even with the week prior, when there were 398 outages. Specific to the U.S., there were 199 outages, which is up 2% from 196 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages decreased from 205 to 190 outages, a 7% decrease compared to the week prior. In the U.S., ISP outages decreased from 88 to 64, a 27% decrease.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages increased from 96 to 137 outages. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages increased from 69 to 96 outages.
• Collaboration app network outages: Globally, there was one collaboration application network outage, same as the week prior. In the U.S., there was one collaboration application outage, ending a four-week run of zero outages.

Two notable outages

On February 17, UUNET Verizon, acquired by Verizon in 2006 and now operating as Verizon Business, experienced an outage that affected customers and partners across multiple regions, including the U.S., Singapore, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Brazil, Germany, Switzerland, Canada, the U.K., Ireland, Japan, South Korea, Australia, France, and India. The outage lasted a total of an hour, over a one hour and 15-minute period. The outage was first observed around 2:00 PM EST and initially centered on Verizon Business nodes in Washington, D.C. Five minutes into the outage the nodes located in Washington, D.C., were joined by nodes located in Brooklyn, NY, in exhibiting outage conditions. A further five minutes later the nodes located in Brooklyn, NY, were replaced by nodes located in New York, NY, in exhibiting outage conditions. The outage was cleared around 3:15 PM EST. Click here for an interactive view.

On February 18, Cogent Communications, a multinational transit provider based in the U.S., experienced an outage that impacted multiple downstream providers as well as Cogent customers across various regions, including the U.S., Brazil, Japan, the Philippines, Ghana, Hong Kong, India, the U.K., Singapore, Indonesia, Canada, South Africa, Spain, Mexico, and Taiwan. The outage, which lasted 20 minutes, was first observed around 8:15 AM EST and initially appeared to center on Cogent nodes located in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, CA, and Dallas, TX. Around ten minutes after first being observed, the nodes located in Washington, D.C., and Dallas, TX appeared to clear. Around five minutes later the nodes experiencing outage conditions expanded to include nodes in Dallas, TX, San Francisco, CA, and Phoenix, AZ. This increase in the number of nodes and locations exhibiting outage conditions appeared to coincide with an increase in the number of impacted regions, downstream partners, and customers. A further five minutes later, nodes located in Phoenix, AZ and Dallas, TX, appeared to clear, leaving only the nodes located in San Francisco, CA, and Los Angeles, CA, exhibiting outage conditions. The outage was resolved around 8:40 AM EST. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet report for Feb. 10-16

ThousandEyes reported 398 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of Feb. 10-16. That’s up 13% from 353 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 196 outages, which is down 7% from 210 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages increased from 173 to 205 outages, an 18% increase compared to the week prior. In the U.S., ISP outages increased slightly from 86 to 88, a 2% increase.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages decreased from 124 to 96 outages. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages decreased from 96 to 69 outages.
• Collaboration app network outages: Globally, collaboration application network outages increased to one outage. In the U.S., levels remained at zero for the third week in a row. 

Two notable outages

On February 12, GTT Communications, a Tier 1 provider headquartered in Tysons, VA, experienced an outage that impacted some of its partners and customers across multiple regions, including the U.S., Germany, the Dominican Republic, Canada, the U.K., Australia, Mexico, Spain, Singapore, Taiwan, Colombia, and Japan. The outage, which lasted 39 minutes, was first observed around 3:05 AM EST and appeared to initially be centered on GTT nodes located in Washington, D.C.  Around ten minutes into the outage, nodes located in Washington, D.C., were joined by GTT nodes located in New York, NY, and Frankfurt, Germany, in exhibiting outage conditions. This increase in the number of nodes and locations exhibiting outage conditions appeared to coincide with an increase in the number of impacted regions, downstream partners, and customers. A further five minutes later, the nodes located in New York, NY, and Frankfurt, Germany, appeared to clear. The outage was cleared around 3:45 AM EST. Click here for an interactive view.

On February 12, Lumen, a U.S. based Tier 1 carrier, experienced an outage that affected customers and downstream partners across the U.S. The outage, lasting 40 minutes, was first observed around 3:10 AM EST and appeared to initially be centered on Lumen nodes located in Kansas City, MO. Around 15 minutes after first being observed, the nodes located in Kansas City, MO, were joined by nodes located in Dallas, TX, in exhibiting outage conditions. This increase appeared to coincide with an increase in the number of impacted downstream partners, and customers. The outage was cleared around 3:55 AM EST. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet report for Feb. 3-9

ThousandEyes reported 353 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of Feb. 3-9. That’s up 7% from 331 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 210 outages, which up 12% from 188 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages increased from 126 to 173 outages, a 37% increase compared to the week prior. In the U.S., ISP outages increased from 65 to 86, a 32% increase.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages decreased from 144 to 124 outages. In the U.S., however, cloud provider network outages increased from 88 to 96 outages.
• Collaboration app network outages: Both globally and in the U.S., collaboration application network outages remained at zero for the second week in a row.

Two notable outages

On February 5, Lumen, a U.S. based Tier 1 carrier, experienced an outage that affected customers and downstream partners across multiple regions including the U.S., Canada, and Singapore. The outage, lasting a total of 35 minutes over a forty-five-minute period, was first observed around 3:30 AM EST and appeared to initially be centered on Lumen nodes located in Seattle, WA. Around five minutes into the outage, the nodes located in Seattle, WA were joined by nodes located in Los Angeles, CA, in exhibiting outage conditions. This increase in the number and location of nodes exhibiting outage conditions appeared to coincide with the peak in terms of the number of impacted regions, downstream partners, and customers. A further five minutes later, the nodes located in Los Angeles, CA, appeared to clear, leaving only the nodes located in Seattle, WA, in exhibiting outage conditions. The outage was cleared around 4:15 AM EST. Click here for an interactive view.

On February 6, Internap, a U.S. based cloud service provider, experienced an outage that impacted many of its downstream partners and customers within the U.S. The outage, lasting a total of one hour and 14 minutes, over a one hour and 28-minute period, was first observed around 12:15 AM EST and appeared to be centered on Internap nodes located in Boston, MA. The outage was at its peak around one hour and 10 minutes after being observed, with the highest number of impacted partners, and customers. The outage was cleared around 1:45 AM EST. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet report for Jan. 27-Feb. 2

ThousandEyes reported 331 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of Jan. 27-Feb. 2. That’s down 16% from 395 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 188 outages, which down 4% from 195 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages decreased from 199 to 126 outages, a 37% decrease compared to the week prior. In the U.S., ISP outages decreased slightly from 67 to 65, a 3% decrease.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages increased slightly from 142 to 144 outages. In the U.S., however, cloud provider network outages decreased from 110 to 88 outages.
• Collaboration app network outages: Both globally and in the U.S., collaboration application network outages dropped down to zero. 

Two notable outages

On January 29, Arelion (formerly known as Telia Carrier), a global Tier 1 provider headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, experienced an outage that impacted customers and downstream partners across multiple regions, including the U.S., Australia, Argentina, Belgium, Bahrain, Germany, France, Brazil, India, Peru, Mexico, and Guatemala. The disruption, which lasted a total of 24 minutes over a 55-minute period, was first observed around 12:40 PM EST and appeared to initially center on nodes located in Dallas, TX, and Ghent, Belgium. Fifteen minutes after appearing to clear, the nodes located in Dallas, TX, began exhibiting outage conditions again. Around 12:20 PM EST, the nodes located in Dallas, TX, were joined by nodes located in Atlanta, GA, in exhibiting outage conditions. This rise in nodes and locations exhibiting outage conditions also appeared to coincide with an increase in the number of downstream customers, partners, and regions impacted. The outage was cleared around 1:35 PM EST. Click here for an interactive view.

On February 2, Cogent Communications, a multinational transit provider based in the U.S., experienced an outage that affected customers and downstream partners across multiple regions including the U.S., Poland, and Spain. The outage, lasting a total of 22 minutes, was first observed around 3:10 AM EST and appeared to initially center on nodes located in Washington, D.C. Fifteen minutes after first being observed, the nodes located in Washington, D.C., appeared to clear and were replaced by nodes located in Miami, FL, in exhibiting outage conditions. A further five minutes later, the nodes located in Miami, FL, were joined by nodes located in Atlanta, GA, in exhibiting outage conditions. This increase in nodes exhibiting outage conditions appeared to coincide with an increase in the number of impacted downstream partners and customers. The outage was cleared around 3:55 AM EST. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet report for Jan. 20-26

ThousandEyes reported 395 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of Jan. 20-26. That’s up 20% from 328 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 195 outages, which up 24% from 157 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages increased slightly from 186 to 199 outages, a 7% increase compared to the week prior. In the U.S., ISP outages increased from 53 to 67, a 26% increase.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages jumped from 76 to 142 outages. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages increased from 69 to 110 outages.
• Collaboration app network outages: Globally, collaboration application network outages remained unchanged from the week prior, recording 1 outage. In the U.S., collaboration application network outages dropped to zero.

Two notable outages

On January 24, Lumen, a U.S. based Tier 1 carrier, experienced an outage that affected customers and downstream partners across multiple regions including the U.S., Italy, Canada, France, India, the U.K., Germany, and the Netherlands. The outage, lasting a total of 37 minutes, over a period of 45 minutes, was first observed around 1:20 AM EST and appeared to be centered on Lumen nodes located in New York, NY.  Around five minutes into the outage, a number of Lumen nodes exhibiting outage conditions in New York, NY, appeared to reduce. This drop in the number of nodes exhibiting outage conditions appeared to coincide with a decrease in the number of impacted downstream partners, and customers. The outage was cleared around 7:05 AM EST. Click here for an interactive view.

On January 23, AT&T, U.S.-based telecommunications company, experienced an outage on its network that impacted AT&T customers and partners across the U.S. The outage, lasting a total of 13 minutes over a 20-minute period, was first observed around 10:35 AM EST and appeared to center on AT&T nodes located in Dallas, TX. Around 15 minutes after first being observed, the number of nodes exhibiting outage conditions located in Dallas, TX, appeared to reduce. This decrease in nodes exhibiting outage conditions appeared to coincide with a drop in the number of impacted partners and customers. The outage was cleared at around 10:35 AM EST. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet report for Jan. 13-19

ThousandEyes reported 328 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of Jan. 13-19. That’s up 11% from 296 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 157 outages, which up 34% from 117 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages increased slightly from 182 to 186 outages, a 2% increase compared to the week prior. In the U.S., ISP outages increased from 40 to 53, a 33% increase.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages increased from 72 to 76 outages. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages increased from 54 to 69 outages.
• Collaboration app network outages: Globally, and in the U.S., collaboration application network outages dropped from two outages to one.

Two notable outages

On January 15, Lumen, a U.S. based Tier 1 carrier (previously known as CenturyLink), experienced an outage that affected customers and downstream partners across multiple regions including the U.S., Hong Kong, Germany, Canada, the U.K., Chile, Colombia, Austria, India, Australia, the Netherlands, Spain, France, Singapore, Japan, South Africa, Nigeria, China, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Peru, Norway, Argentina, Turkey, Hungary, Ireland, New Zealand, Egypt, the Philippines, Italy, Sweden, Bulgaria, Estonia, Romania, and Mexico. The outage, lasting a total of one hour and 5 minutes over a nearly three-hour period, was first observed around 5:02 AM EST and appeared to initially be centered on Lumen nodes located in Dallas, TX.  Around one hour after appearing to clear, nodes located in Dallas, TX, began exhibiting outage conditions again, this time joined by Lumen nodes located in San Jose, CA, Washington, D.C., Chicago. IL, New York, NY, London, England, Los Angeles, CA, San Francisco, CA, Sacramento, CA, Fresno, CA, Seattle, WA, Santa Clara, CA, and Colorado Springs, CO, in exhibiting outage conditions. This increase in the number and location of nodes exhibiting outage conditions appeared to coincide with the peak in terms of the number of regions and downstream partners, and customers impacted. The outage was cleared around 7:25 AM EST. Click here for an interactive view.

On January 16, Hurricane Electric, a network transit provider headquartered in Fremont, CA, experienced an outage that impacted customers and downstream partners across multiple regions, including the U.S., Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, the U.K., Canada, South Korea, Japan, Thailand, and Germany. The outage, lasting 22 minutes, was first observed around 2:28 AM EST and initially appeared to center on Hurricane Electric nodes located in Chicago, IL. Five minutes into the outage, the nodes located in Chicago, IL, were joined by Hurricane Electric nodes located in Portland, OR, Seattle, WA, and Ashburn, VA, in exhibiting outage conditions. This coincided with an increase in the number of downstream partners and countries impacted. Around 12 minutes into the outage, all nodes, except those located in Chicago, IL, appeared to clear. The outage was cleared at around 2:55 AM EST. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet report for Jan. 6-12

ThousandEyes reported 296 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of Jan. 6. That’s double the number of outages the week prior (148). Specific to the U.S., there were 117 outages, which up 50% from 78 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages increased from 80 to 182 outages, a 127% increase compared to the week prior. In the U.S., ISP outages increased from 25 to 40, a 60% increase.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages increased from 34 to 72 outages. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages increased from 31 to 54 outages.
• Collaboration app network outages: Globally, and in the U.S., there were two collaboration application network outages, up from one a week earlier.

Two notable outages

On January 8, Cogent Communications, a multinational transit provider based in the U.S., experienced an outage that impacted multiple downstream providers and customers across various regions, including the U.S., India, Canada, Mexico, Singapore, South Africa, Indonesia, Sweden, the U.K., Honduras, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, Poland, the Netherlands, Australia, the Philippines, Greece, Germany, Argentina, New Zealand, France, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Colombia. The outage lasted a total of one hour and nine minutes, distributed across a series of occurrences over a period of three hours and 50 minutes. The first occurrence of the outage was observed around 6:00 AM EST and initially seemed to be centered on Cogent nodes located in Los Angeles, CA. Around three hours and 20 minutes after first being observed, nodes in Los Angeles, CA, began exhibiting outage conditions again, this time accompanied by nodes in Chicago, IL, El Paso, TX, and San Jose, CA. This increase in nodes experiencing outages appeared to coincide with a rise in the number of affected downstream customers, partners, and regions. Five minutes later, the nodes located in Chicago, IL, and El Paso, TX, appeared to clear, leaving only the nodes in Los Angeles, CA, and San Jose, CA, exhibiting outage conditions. The outage was cleared around 9:50 AM EST. Click here for an interactive view.

On January 10, Lumen, a U.S. based Tier 1 carrier (previously known as CenturyLink), experienced an outage that affected customers and downstream partners across multiple regions including Switzerland, South Africa, Egypt, the U.K., the U.S., Spain, Portugal, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, France, Hong Kong, and Italy The outage, lasting a total of 19 minutes, was first observed around 9:05 PM EST and appeared to be centered on Lumen nodes located in London, England, and Washington, D.C. Around twenty-five minutes from when the outage was first observed, the nodes located in London, England, appeared to clear, leaving only Lumen nodes located in Washington, D.C. exhibiting outage conditions. This drop in the number of nodes and locations exhibiting outage conditions appeared to coincide with a decrease in the number of impacted downstream partners, and customers. The outage was cleared around 9:55 PM CET. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet report for Dec. 30, 2024-Jan. 5, 2025

ThousandEyes reported 148 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of Dec. 30, 2024. That’s up 95% from 76 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 78 outages, which up nearly threefold from 28 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

• ISP outages: Globally, total ISP outages increased from 46 to 80 outages, a 74% increase compared to the week prior. In the U.S., ISP outages increased from 10 to 25, a 150% increase.
• Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages increased from 18 to 34 outages. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages increased from 13 to 31 outages.
• Collaboration app network outages: There was one collaboration application network outage globally and in the U.S., which is an increase from zero in the previous week.

Two notable outages

On December 30, Neustar, a U.S. based technology service provider headquartered in Sterling, VA, experienced an outage that impacted multiple downstream providers, as well as Neustar customers within multiple regions, including the U.S., Mexico, Taiwan, Singapore, Canada, the U.K., Spain, Romania, Germany, Luxembourg, France, Costa Rica, Ireland, Japan, India, Hong Kong, and the Philippines. The outage, lasting a total of one hour and 40 minutes, was first observed around 2:00 PM EST and appeared to initially center on Neustar nodes located in Los Angeles, CA, and Washington, D.C. Around 10 minutes into the outage, nodes located in Washington, D.C., were replaced by nodes located in Ashburn, VA, in exhibiting outage conditions. Around 10 minutes later, nodes located in Virginia, VA, and Los Angeles, CA, appeared to clear and were replaced by nodes located in Dallas, TX and San Jose, CA, in exhibiting outage conditions. Five minutes later, these nodes were replaced by nodes located in London, England, Ashburn, VA, New York, NY, and Washington, D.C. A further five minutes later, these nodes were joined by nodes located in Dallas, TX, in exhibiting outage conditions. This increase in nodes exhibiting outage conditions also appeared to coincide with an increase in the number of downstream partners and regions impacted. The outage was cleared around 3:40 PM EST. Click here for an interactive view.

On January 4, AT&T experienced an outage on their network that impacted AT&T customers and partners across multiple regions including the U.S., Ireland, the Philippines, the U.K., France, and Canada. The outage, lasting around 23 minutes, was first observed around 3:35 AM EST, appearing to initially center on AT&T nodes located in Phoenix, AZ, Los Angeles, CA, San Jose, CA, and New York, NY. Around ten minutes into the outage, nodes located in Phoenix, AZ, and San Jose, CA, appeared to clear, leaving just nodes located in Los Angeles, CA, and New York, NY, exhibiting outage conditions. This decrease in nodes exhibiting outage conditions appeared to coincide with a drop in the number of impacted partners and customers. The outage was cleared at around 4:00 AM EST. Click here for an interactive view.

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As AI networking technology blossoms, yet another group has formed to make sure Ethernet can handle the stress.

AMD, Arista, ARM, Broadcom, Cisco, HPE Networking, Marvell, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI and Oracle have joined the new Ethernet for Scale-Up Networking (ESUN) initiative, which promises to advance the networking technology to handle scale-up connectivity across accelerated AI infrastructure. ESUN was formed by the nonprofit Open Compute Project, which is hosting its 2025 OCP Global Summit this week in San Jose, Calif.

“AI workloads are re-shaping modern data center architectures, and networking solutions must evolve to meet the growing demands,” wrote Martin Lund, executive vice president of Cisco’s common hardware group, in a blog post about the news. “ESUN brings together AI infrastructure operators and vendors to align on open standards, incorporate best practices, and accelerate innovation in Ethernet solutions for scale-up networking.”

ESUN will focus solely on open, standards-based Ethernet switching and framing for scale-up networking—excluding host-side stacks, non-Ethernet protocols, application-layer solutions, and proprietary technologies. The group will expand the development and interoperability of XPU network interfaces and Ethernet switch ASICs for scale-up networks, the OCP stated in a blog: “The Initial focus will be on L2/L3 Ethernet framing and switching, enabling robust, lossless, and error-resilient single-hop and multi-hop topologies.”

ESUN, UEC and UALink

Importantly, OCP says ESUN will actively engage with other organizations looking to advance Ethernet for AI networks, such as the Ultra-Ethernet Consortium (UEC), and long-standing IEEE 802.3 Ethernet to align open standards, incorporate best practices, and accelerate innovation.

AMD, Arista, Broadcom, Cisco, Eviden, HPE, Intel, Meta and Microsoft originally formed the UEC in 2023 — which now has more than 75 members — with the goal to bring together industry leaders to build a complete Ethernet-based communication stack architecture for high-performance networking.

Another multivendor development group, the Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) consortium, recently published its first specification aimed at delivering an open standard interconnect for AI clusters. The UALink 200G 1.0 Specification was crafted by many of the group’s 75 members — which include AMD, Broadcom, Cisco, Google, HPE, Intel, Meta, Microsoft and Synopsys — and lays out the technology needed to support a maximum data rate of 200 Giga transfers per second (GT/s) per channel or lane between accelerators and switches between up to 1,024 AI computing pods, UALink stated. 

ESUN will leverage the work of IEEE and UEC for Ethernet when possible, stated Arista’s CEO Jayshree Ullal and chief development officer Hugh Holbrook in a blog post about ESUN. To that end, Ullal and Holbrook described a modular framework for Ethernet scale-up with three key building blocks:

1. Common Ethernet headers for Interoperability: ESUN will build on top of Ethernet to enable the widest range of upper-layer protocols and use cases.
2. Open Ethernet data link layer: Provides the foundation for AI collectives with high-performance at XPU cluster scale. By selecting standards-based mechanisms (such as Link-Layer Retry (LLR), Priority-based Flow Control (PFC) and Credit-based Flow Control (CBFC), ESUN enables cost-efficiency and flexibility with performance for these networks. Even minor delays can stall thousands of concurrent operations.
3. Ethernet PHY layer: By relying on the ubiquitous Ethernet physical layer, interoperability across multiple vendors and a wide range of optical and copper interconnect options is assured.

“ESUN is designed to support any upper layer transport, including one based on SUE-T. SUE-T (Scale-Up Ethernet Transport) is a new OCP workstream, seeded by Broadcom’s contribution of SUE (Scale-Up Ethernet) to OCP. SUE-T looks to define functionality that can be easily integrated into an ESUN-based XPU for reliability scheduling, load balancing, and transaction packing, which are critical performance enhancers for some AI workloads,” Ullal and Holbrook wrote.

“In essence, the ESUN framework enables a collection of individual accelerators to become a single, powerful AI super computer, where network performance directly correlates to the speed and efficiency of AI model development and execution,” Ullal and Holbrook wrote. “The layered approach of ESUN and SUE-T over Ethernet promotes innovation without fragmentation. XPU accelerator developers retain flexibility on host-side choices such as access models (push vs. pull, and memory vs streaming semantics), transport reliability (hop-by-hop vs. end-to-end), ordering rules, and congestion control strategies while retaining system design choices. The ESUN initiative takes a practical approach for iterative improvements.”

Gartner expects gains in AI networking fabrics

Scale-up AI fabrics (SAIF) have captured a lot of industry attention lately, according to Gartner. The research firm is forecasting massive growth in SAIF to support AI infrastructure initiatives through 2029. The vendor landscape will remain dynamic over the next two years, with multiple technology ecosystems emerging, Gartner wrote in its report, What are “Scale-Up” AI Fabrics and Why Should I Care?

“Scale-Up” AI fabrics (SAIF) provide high-bandwidth, low-latency physical network interconnectivity and enhanced memory interaction between nearby AI processors,” Garter wrote. “Current implementations of SAIF are vendor-proprietary platforms, and there are proximity limitations (typically, SAIF is confined to only a rack or row). In most scenarios, Gartner recommends using Ethernet when connecting multiple SAIF systems together. We believe the scale, performance and supportability of Ethernet is optimal.”

“From 2025 through 2027, we expect major shifts in this technology, including traction for Nvidia’s SAIF offering and other SAIF options. As of mid-2025, this technology segment remains dominated by Nvidia, who is evolving and expanding its Nvlink technology to partners such as Marvell, Fujitsu, Qualcomm and Astera Labs to directly integrate with NVIDIA’s SAIF offering (branded as Nvidia NVlink Fusion),” Gartner stated.

However, competing ecosystems are emerging, including UALink and others, and the result of these initiatives creates the potential for a multivendor ecosystem, greater flexibility and reduced lock-in, leading to a more competitive environment, Gartner wrote.

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Network infrastructure has become a performance constraint in large-scale AI training, and Broadcom has spent the past three years building an AI networking portfolio that aims to solve this problem.

Over the last several  months, the company rolled out Tomahawk 6 switches for scale-out networking and Jericho 4 for inter->Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) 1.0 specifications and introduces hardware-accelerated capabilities to modernize RDMA.

“This is not the last piece of the puzzle, I would say, but a very important piece of what we have been working on for the last three years and delivered over the last three to four months, which is a complete portfolio,” Hasan Siraj, head of software products and ecosystem at Broadcom, told Network World. “The key message for you is this NIC is fully compliant with Ultra Ethernet features right at 800 gig, and there is nothing else in the industry that can cater to this.”

Scale-out vs. scale-up: Understanding the market segmentation

Thor Ultra targets a specific networking domain that differs fundamentally from GPU-to-GPU interconnects. 

Within a single rack, GPUs connect through technologies like NVLink in what Broadcom terms “scale-up” domains. These typically span 72 to 256 XPUs that directly access each other’s memory. Thor Ultra addresses “scale-out” connectivity, the rack-to-rack networking required to create clusters spanning hundreds of thousands of XPUs. This positions it against Nvidia’s Ethernet offerings (Spectrum-X switches and BlueField NICs) and InfiniBand solutions rather than competing with NVLink.

“When you need to get out of that rack and you need to connect multiple of these racks together, you need to scale out. This is where this NIC gets used,” Hassan explained.

The NIC ships in two SerDes configurations. The 100G version provides eight 100G lanes. The 200G version offers four 200G lanes. Both deliver 800G aggregate bandwidth through 16 lanes of PCIe Gen 6. The dual configuration strategy accommodates both current 100G ecosystems and emerging 200G deployments.

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Broadcom

Breaking RDMA’s architectural constraints

Traditional RDMA protocols carry design limitations from their origins two to three decades ago. They lack multipathing support, cannot handle out-of-order packet delivery and rely on Go-Back-N retransmission. Under Go-Back-N, a single dropped packet forces retransmission of that packet plus every subsequent packet in the sequence.

These limitations become critical at scale. Network congestion increases packet loss. Go-Back-N amplifies the problem by flooding already-congested links with redundant retransmissions. Thor Ultra implements four architectural changes to break these constraints.

• Packet-level multipathing. The NIC divides its eight 100G lanes into separate network planes. Packets from a single message can be distributed across all planes for load balancing. Standard RDMA requires all packets in a flow to traverse a single path, preventing this optimization.
• Out-of-order data placement. Thor Ultra writes packets directly to XPU memory as they arrive, regardless of sequence. The NIC does not buffer packets awaiting in-order delivery. Instead, it tracks packet state and places each into its correct memory location immediately.
• Selective acknowledgment and retransmission. Thor Ultra replaces Go-Back-N with selective acknowledgment. When packets 3 and 6 are missing from a sequence of 1 through 8, the NIC sends a SACK indicating exactly which packets arrived and which are missing. The sender retransmits only packets 3 and 6.
• Programmable congestion Control. The NIC implements a hardware pipeline that supports multiple congestion control algorithms. Two schemes are currently available: receiver-based congestion control (receivers send credits to senders) and sender-based approaches (senders calculate round-trip time to determine transmission rates). The programmable pipeline can accommodate future UEC specification revisions or custom hyperscaler algorithms. 

Performance and power

Thor Ultra consumes approximately 50 watts. This compares to 125-150W for products like Nvidia’s BlueField 3 DPU. The power difference stems from architectural choices rather than process technology.

DPUs target multiple use cases including front-end networking (requiring deep packet inspection and encryption), storage offload and security functions. They incorporate ARM cores, large memory subsystems and extensive acceleration engines. Thor Ultra strips out everything not required for AI backend networking.

Overall, Broadcom projects 10-15% improvement in job completion time through the combination of efficient load balancing, out-of-order delivery and selective retransmission. The company argues this improvement justifies the network investment.

“We believe we can achieve at least 10 to 15% improvement in job completion time, which, if you look at when you’re building a cluster, whether you talk about an 8,000-node cluster, or 100,000-node cluster, the network is about 10-15% of the cost,” Hassan said. “So, the network can pay for itself with this kind of innovation.”

Thor Ultra is sampling now with availability in PCIe and OCP 3.0 form factors. Broadcom expects roughly equal volume between both formats over the next two years. The company offers three additional consumption models beyond standard cards. Customers can purchase discrete chips for custom board designs, and XPU or GPU manufacturers can integrate Thor Ultra as a chiplet. Broadcom will license the design as intellectual property.

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Nokia Bell Labs has a lot to celebrate. The research giant marked its 100th anniversary in May at its venerable campus in Murray Hill—part of New Providence, N.J.—where major technological developments have occurred, such as the Bellmac-32 microprocessor and the satellite Earth station known as the Horn Antenna, which helped prove the big bang theory.

The company also held a groundbreaking ceremony on 4 September for its new headquarters in New Brunswick, N.J., about 32 kilometers south of Murray Hill and 10 km from IEEE’s Piscataway office.

Construction of the 10-story, 34,374-square-meter building is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2027. The Health and Life Science Exchange 2 building, known as HELIX 2, is the second of three planned edifices being constructed in the city’s new innovation district, which is designed to attract research labs, workspaces, and office suites for startups.

Attendees at the ceremony included Thierry E. Klein, the Bell Labs solutions research president, and Peter Vetter, the Bell Labs core research president. Both men are IEEE Fellows. New Jersey’s governor, Phil Murphy, was there too, as were New Brunswick Mayor James Cahill and other state and local officials.

“Today’s groundbreaking marks a new and exciting chapter in Bell Labs’ long history in New Jersey,” Klein said. “As we build and move into the HELIX, this continues our legacy of excellence, pioneering spirit, and commitment to breakthrough research on the East Coast. The location offers unique advantages that will accelerate our innovation capabilities and provide greater proximity to academic centers of excellence and fantastic new startups and ventures.”

The new location, he said, “will give access to a vibrant and urban environment that will help us attract the next generation of talent. Access to universities such as Princeton, Rutgers, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and the Stevens Institute of Technology is incomparable. This is not just a move for the next two, three, four, or five years; this is going to be home for Bell Labs for a very, very long time.”

A hub of innovation

Nokia Bell Labs could have relocated its headquarters anywhere in the world, Murphy noted, but it chose to remain in New Jersey.

“Our illustrious history of innovation in New Jersey could be summarized in two words: Bell Labs,” the governor said. “For over a century, Bell Labs has transformed our state, our nation, and the world. This is literally an iconic and globally unique institution. We break ground and start to establish a new foundation for quantum physics, generative artificial intelligence, and optical communications. Through partnerships, joint ventures, and spinoffs, Nokia Bell Labs will facilitate new products and companies that will [continue to] drive the innovation economy in New Jersey.”

To ensure New Jersey would be at the forefront of innovation, the governor in 2018 announced his intent to establish 12 innovation hubs throughout the state as a way to attract entrepreneurs, startups, and early-stage companies. The first hub—the HELIX 1 building, adjacent to Nokia Bell Labs’ new headquarters—is expected to open next year and include Rutgers’s medical school and translational research institute.

New Jersey’s governor, Phil Murphy, at the podium addresses attendees at the groundbreaking ceremony. Nokia

The facilities will offer furnished offices and labs outfitted with scientific equipment, officials say. Tenants will include Hackensack Meridian Health and Robert Wood Johnson Barnabas Health.

New Brunswick is no stranger to innovators, Cahill noted. The Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical company is headquartered in the city and got its start in a local wallpaper factory. The Johnson brothers and Thomas Edison often ate at a nearby drugstore lunch counter, where they discussed advancements in manufacturing, the mayor said. Edison’s laboratory was in Menlo Park. Cahill also said that Albert Einstein, who worked at Princeton University and lived in the town, was often spotted strolling the streets of New Brunswick, about 30 km away.

State-of-the-art research facilities

The new Nokia Bell Lab offices will cater to the needs of research scientists and specialists in focused areas, Klein said.

“It’s an efficient, modern, and low-carbon facility providing sustainable power, heating, and cooling capabilities,” he said. “Our researchers will have access to the best facility possible. That is our dream.”

This is not the first time Bell Labs has moved its headquarters, Vetter noted. The primary R&D activities were set up in New York City in 1925. They moved to Murray Hill in 1941. Some of the biggest innovations were developed there during the following decade, including the transistor and the cellular network.

“I want to think that our move will again be a catalyst for breakthrough innovations to happen in the decade after we move in and will be in a variety of areas such as 7G, AI, quantum computing, and quantum network security,” Vetter said.

“As we build and move into the HELIX, this continues our legacy of excellence, pioneering spirit, and commitment to breakthrough research on the East Coast.” —Thierry Klein

“We also need to make sure the research goes into the real world,” he said. “We like to say that if somebody has a problem in the real world and you solve it in the lab but you don’t make that leap of technology into the real world, the problem still exists.

“It’s not just research or breakthrough technologies,” he added. “It’s also creating the companies that will commercialize these technologies and lead the next century of innovation.”

IEEE Milestones recognize Bell Labs innovations

Another celebratory event is scheduled for 21 October in Murray Hill. Several technologies developed there are to be designated as IEEE Milestones. The technologies include three Nobel Prize winners: super-resolved microscopy, the charge-coupled device, and the fractional quantum hall effect. IEEE Region 1 and the IEEE North Jersey Section sponsored the nominations.

Administered by the IEEE History Center and supported by donors, the Milestones program recognizes outstanding technical developments around the world.

Watch for The Institute’s article on the Nokia Bell Labs Milestone achievement ceremony in November.

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OpenAI will soon allow “erotica” for ChatGPT users who verify their age on the platform. In an X post on Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company will add support for mature conversations when it launches age-gating in December.

“As we roll out age-gating more fully and as part of our ‘treat adult users like adults’ principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults,” Altman writes. Earlier this month, OpenAI hinted at allowing developers to create “mature” ChatGPT apps after it implements the “appropriate age verification and controls.”

OpenAI isn’t the only company dipping into erotica, as Elon Musk’s xAI previously launched flirty AI companions, which appear as 3D anime models in the Grok app. 

Along with the addition of “erotica”, OpenAI also plans on launching a new version of ChatGPT that “behaves more like what people liked about 4o.” Just one day after making GPT-5 the default model powering ChatGPT, OpenAI brought back GPT-4o as an option after people complained the new model was less personable.

Altman said OpenAI made ChatGPT “pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues,” adding that the company realized this change made the chatbot “less useful/enjoyable to many users who had no mental health problems.” OpenAI has since launched tools to “better detect” when a user is in mental distress. 

OpenAI also announced the formation of a council on “well-being and AI” to help shape OpenAI’s response to “complex or sensitive” scenarios. The council is comprised of a team of eight researchers and experts who study the impact of technology and AI on mental health. But, as Ars Technica points out, it doesn’t include any suicide prevention experts, many of whom recently called on OpenAI to roll out additional safeguards for users with suicidal thoughts.

“Now that we have been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues and have new tools, we are going to be able to safely relax the restrictions in most cases,” Altman writes in his post on X.

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Any ebook reader will let you cram a Beauty and the Beast-sized library’s worth of books in your pocket, but so will your phone. An ebook reader offers a more book-like reading experience, with fewer distractions and less eye strain, and many include extra features, like adjustable frontlighting. Some really are pocketable. Others are waterproof or offer physical page-turning buttons, while a few even let you take notes.

I’ve been using ebook readers for nearly a decade, and I’ve gone hands-on with dozens, from the Kindle Paperwhite to lesser-known rivals like the PocketBook Era. Whether you want something your kid can throw against the wall or a waterproof, warm-glow Kindle that won’t ruin your spa ambiance, these are the best ebook readers for everyone. 

1. The best Kindle
2. The best non-Amazon ebook reader
3. The best cheap ebook reader
4. The best ebook reader for taking notes
5. Other ebook readers that didn’t make the cut
6. What’s coming next

The best Kindle

Kindle Paperwhite (2024)

Score: 8

ProsCons

• The best-looking screen on any e-reader
• Slightly larger screen without a noticeably larger device
• Faster page turns, loading, and a more responsive UI
• A splash of color (without a color screen)

• Upgrades aren’t as significant as the last Paperwhite
• Lacks stylus support and page turn buttons
• Signature Edition wireless charging is frustrating without magnets
• Signature Edition back panel feels less grippy

Where to Buy:

• $159.99 at Amazon (ad-supported)
• $159.99 at Best Buy (ad-supported)
• $159.99 at Target (ad-supported)

Dimensions: 7 x 5 x .3 inches / Weight: 211 grams / Screen area and resolution: 7-inch screen, 300ppi resolution / Storage: 16GB / Other features: IPX8 waterproofing, Bluetooth audio support 

If you mostly buy ebooks from Amazon, you’ll want a Kindle, and the 12th-gen Kindle Paperwhite is the best choice for most people. Starting at $159.99, it’s cheaper than the Kobo Libra Colour — my top non-Amazon ebook reader, which I’ll dive into later — while offering many of the same features. Those include a spacious 7-inch 300pi display with rich contrast levels and an adjustable warm white frontlight, which make for a clear and enjoyable reading experience. The latter also conveniently improves sleep by cutting down on blue light that interrupts melatonin production. 

That warm white frontlighting is an advantage over the cool white of the $109.99 base-model Kindle, and unlike the base Kindle, the Paperwhite has IPX8 water resistance. The $199.99 Signature Edition Paperwhite also has an auto-adjusting frontlight and no lockscreen ads. It has wireless charging, which is a rare feature to find in an e-reader.

Amazon dominates the US ebook market, so Kindle owners have access to advantages owners of other ebook readers don’t. Much of Amazon’s hardware strategy depends on offering cut-rate discounts to pull you into its content ecosystem. If you have Prime and buy a lot of Kindle ebooks, the Paperwhite is the best choice because its ebooks and audiobooks are often on sale at Amazon, and Prime members get more free content through Prime Reading. Rivals like Kobo offer sales, too, but it’s hard for them to offer discounts as steep as Amazon.

There are downsides, though. The Paperwhite has lockscreen ads unless you pay $20 extra to get rid of them. It’s also too big to hold comfortably with one hand. Perhaps the Kindle Paperwhite’s biggest flaw, though — which it shares with all Kindles aside from Fire tablets — is that it’s not easy to read books purchased outside of Amazon’s store. Kindle ebook formats are proprietary and only work on Kindle. Unlike Kobo and other ebook readers, Kindles don’t support EPUB files, an open file format used by pretty much everyone except Amazon. So, for example, if you often shop from Kobo’s bookstore (or Barnes & Noble or Google Play Books or many other ebook stores), you can’t easily read those books on a Kindle without using a workaround. There are ways to convert and transfer file formats so you can read on the Kindle and vice versa, but it’ll take a couple of extra steps.

However, if you don’t buy your books elsewhere or you don’t mind shopping from Amazon, you’ll be more than happy with the Kindle Paperwhite.

Read our Kindle Paperwhite review.

The best non-Amazon ebook reader

Kobo Libra Colour (32GB, ad-free)

ProsCons

• Nice color screen with sharp, 300ppi black-and-white resolution
• Physical page-turning buttons
• Built-in stylus support
• Compatible with Overdrive

• Getting books from other stores onto the device can be tough
• More expensive than the Kindle Paperwhite
• Lacks the vibrancy of other color e-readers
• No wireless charging

Where to Buy:

• $229.99 at Amazon
• $229.99 at Rakuten Kobo
• $229.99 at Target

Dimensions: 5.69 x 6.34 x 0.33 inches / Weight: 199.5 grams / Screen area and resolution: 7-inch screen, 300ppi (black-and-white), 150ppi (color) / Storage: 32GB / Other features: Physical page-turning buttons, waterproofing, Kobo Stylus 2 support, Bluetooth audio support 

The Kobo Libra Colour is an excellent alternative to Amazon’s ebook readers, especially for readers outside the US or anyone who doesn’t want to tap into Amazon’s ecosystem. Kobo’s latest slate offers many of the standout features found on the 12th-gen Kindle Paperwhite — including waterproofing, USB-C support, and a 300ppi display — along with a few perks that make it more helpful and enjoyable to use.

The color display is the most obvious. The Libra Colour uses E Ink’s latest Kaledio color screen technology, which provides soothing, pastel-like hues that still pop in direct sunlight. It’s not as sharp as reading in monochrome — the resolution drops to 150ppi when viewing content in color — but it’s a nice touch that makes viewing a wider range of content more pleasant. Book covers and comics, while still muted, have an added layer of depth, even if the colors are nowhere near as vivid as that of a traditional LED tablet or as vibrant as the Kindle Colorsoft Signature Edition.

However, unlike the Kindle Colorsoft Signature Edition, the Libra Colour works with a digital pen — the Kobo Stylus 2 (sold separately) — which lets you highlight text in various colors or take notes using Kobo’s integrated notebooks. You can also take advantage of some of the more advanced capabilities found in the Kobo Elipsa 2E, allowing you to solve math equations, convert handwriting into typed text, and insert diagrams. This lets the Libra Colour function as a mini notebook of sorts, though I wouldn’t use it as a primary note-taking device since the seven-inch display can feel cramped to write on.

The color display is only part of the appeal, though. The Libra Colour doesn’t have the lockscreen ads on the base Paperwhite — and packs physical page-turning buttons, which feel more intuitive to use than tapping either side of the display as you have to do on Amazon’s modern e-readers. The speedy e-reader also supports more file formats, including EPUB files, and makes it much easier to borrow books from the Overdrive library system. Until recently, Kobo offered support for the bookmarking app Pocket, which was another big selling point as it let you read saved articles offline. While the app is no longer available, Kobo recently replaced Pocket with Instapaper, which you can download in a free update.

However, at $229.99, the Libra Colour costs $70 more than the entry-level Paperwhite — and that’s without Kobo’s $69.99 stylus, which is required for performing certain tasks. That gap widens further when the Paperwhite is on sale, which happens more often than the Libra Colour. The Kobo can’t easily tap into Amazon’s vast library of ebooks, which can be frustrating if you’ve amassed a collection of Kindle titles over the years. It can be done, but you have to convert file formats using third-party apps, which is tricky and can take time.

But if those things don’t matter or apply to you, the Kobo Libra Colour will give you the best digital reading experience of all the e-readers on our list. It’s my personal favorite.

Read our Kobo Libra Colour review.

The best cheap ebook reader

Kindle (2024)

ProsCons

• Excellent, high-resolution display
• Easy to hold with one hand
• Faster than its predecessor with improved battery life
• Fun color options

• No waterproofing
• Lacks adjustable color temperature
• Slightly more expensive than its predecessor

Where to Buy:

• $109.99 at Amazon (with ads)
• $109.99 at Best Buy (with ads)
• $129.99 at Amazon (without ads)

Dimensions: 6.2 x 4.3 x 0.32 inches / Weight: 158 grams / Screen area and resolution: 6-inch screen, 300ppi resolution / Storage: 16GB / Other features: USB-C support, Bluetooth audio support 

The base-model Kindle ($109.99 with ads) is the best cheap ebook reader. Its 300ppi resolution makes text clearer and easier to read than the lower-resolution screens on other ebook readers in its price range. Plus, it has USB-C for relatively fast charging. 

Reading on its six-inch screen feels a little more cramped than it does on the larger displays of the Kindle Paperwhite and Kobo Libra Colour. However, the flip side is that its small size makes it pocketable, light, and easy for small hands to hold. Combined with its relatively affordable price, the Kindle is also the best ebook reader for kids — especially the Amazon Kindle Kids Edition which costs $20 more. The kid-friendly version shares the same specs but is ad-free with parental controls, a two-year extended replacement guarantee, and a case. It also comes with six months of Amazon Kids Plus, which grants kids access to thousands of children’s books and audiobooks for free. After that, though, you’ll have to $79 per year (or $48 with Amazon Prime).

The base Kindle doesn’t have extra conveniences like the waterproofing you’ll find in the entry-level Kobo Clara BW and Paperwhite. You also don’t get the physical page-turning buttons found on Barnes & Noble’s entry-level e-reader, the Nook GlowLight 4e (though the Kindle is a lot snappier than the Nook). And because it’s an Amazon ebook reader, you’re also locked into the Amazon ecosystem and have to pay extra to remove ads. But if you can do without that, the Kindle delivers the essentials for under $110.

The best ebook reader for taking notes

Kobo Elipsa 2E

ProsCons

• Intuitive note-taking features
• Great e-reader
• Adjustable warm light
• Useful note-taking capabilities, including handwriting-to-text conversion

• Lacks native support for Kindle books
• 227ppi display isn’t as sharp as the competition
• No note-summarization features

Where to Buy:

• $399.99 at Walmart
• $399.99 at Target
• $399.99 at Rakuten Kobo

Dimensions: 7.6 x 8.94 x 0.30 inches / Weight: 390 grams / Screen area and resolution: 10.3-inches, 227ppi resolution / Storage: 32GB / Other features: Handwriting to text conversion, magnetic stylus, Bluetooth audio support 

Of all the large ebook readers I tested, the Kobo Elipsa 2E stood out the most because it’s a good e-reader with solid note-taking abilities. You can write directly on pages just as on a physical book. The Kindle Scribe lets you annotate book pages as well, but it’s complicated involving resizable text boxes that mess up the page formatting and prevent you from doing basic things like circling words. In contrast, taking notes on the Elipsa 2E feels far more intuitive and natural.

The Elipsa 2E offers other helpful note-taking tools and capabilities. Like the Kobo Libra Colour, it’s capable, for example, of solving math equations for you. You can also insert diagrams and drawings, and it’ll automatically snap them into something that looks cleaner and nicer. You can also sync your notes with Dropbox or view them online and convert handwriting to typed text. The Kindle Scribe offers the latter capability, too, but again, Kobo does it faster and better within the original notebook document as opposed to on a separate page. The only thing missing from the Elipsa 2E is the Scribe’s note-summarization feature, but that’s a trade-off I am okay with given how much easier it is to take notes.

Finally, the Kobo Elipsa 2E comes with twice the storage (32GB) for the same price as the base Kindle Scribe. You can step up to the 32GB Kindle Scribe for $20 more or upgrade to 64GB for $40 extra. Yet given the Scribe’s limitations, I still recommend saving the money and buying the Kobo Elipsa 2E instead.

Note-taking capabilities aside, the Kobo Elipsa 2E is also a good e-reader with the same strengths and weaknesses as other Kobo devices. There’s support for a wide range of file formats, but you can’t easily read Kindle books without converting them first. Its 227ppi display is also slightly less sharp than the 300ppi screen found on the Kindle Scribe and the Kobo Libra Colour. However, the 10.3-inch screen balances things out a bit and makes text easier to read, so it’s not a noticeable drawback. Plus, the Elipsa 2E comes with an adjustable warm light for nighttime reading. That’s a feature rival e-readers with more advanced note-taking capabilities — including the $409.99 Onyx Boox Go 10.3, which lets you insert links to notes — lacks.

Other ebook readers that didn’t make the cut

There are some other ebook readers my colleagues and I have tested that I didn’t feature above but are still worth highlighting. Here are the most notable:

Kindle Colorsoft Signature Edition

The Kindle Colorsoft Signature Edition is the first Kindle to feature E Ink’s color screen technology and it stands out from other color e-paper devices with customizations. It offers improved contrast, more vibrant colors, and faster screen refreshes. With a $279.99 price tag, it’s the most expensive Kindle model currently available that doesn’t support a stylus for note-taking, and it includes premium features like wireless charging that are convenient but not really necessary for a device with months of battery life. If you want a color screen and want to stick with Amazon, the Colorsoft Signature is your best option. – Andrew Liszewski, Senior Reporter 

Kindle Colorsoft

Amazon recently introduced a more affordable alternative to the $279.99 Kindle Colorsoft Signature Edition above called the Kindle Colorsoft. It’s $30 cheaper and delivers a nearly identical reading experience. As expected, Amazon excluded some features to hit the lower price point. Let’s run through them. There’s no wireless charging, which I can live without. Storage is halved to 16GB, which is enough for me as I primarily read ebooks. But if you’re buying a color e-reader, chances are high that you’ll want excess storage space for graphic novels, and 16GB may not cut it.

The biggest drawback for me, as a bedtime bookworm, is the lack of an auto-adjusting front light that can make nighttime reading much easier (however, its brightness and color temperature can be manually adjusted). At this price, I expect it, especially since Kobo’s $159.99 Clara Color includes one. And, given that the Colorsoft Signature Edition costs just $30 more, complete with a front light that adjusts when the room gets dim, 32GB of storage, and wireless charging, I’d opt for that instead if you’re in Amazon’s ecosystem. Unless the standard Colorsoft goes on sale for less, it’s not a great value at its regular price.

Kobo Clara Colour

If you’re looking for a non-Amazon alternative that’s more affordable than the Kobo Libra Colour, the Kobo Clara Colour — the successor to the Kobo Clara 2E — is worth a look. At $159.99, the ad-free e-reader costs more than the Kobo Clara 2E, but I think it’s worth the extra $10. It continues to offer the same six-inch display and IPX8 waterproof design, but the e-reader now offers color. It’s also noticeably faster — something I was happy to see, considering the occasional lag on the Clara 2E sometimes got on my nerves. You don’t get the Clara Colour’s physical buttons or stylus support, but that’s a fair tradeoff at this price point. The company recently announced a white version with a slightly larger 1,900mAh battery compared to the black model’s 1,500mAh (notably, without a price increase), which Kobo says can last over a month on a single charge.

Nook Glowlight 4 Plus

In 2023, Barnes and Noble released the Nook Glowlight 4 Plus. If you own a lot of digital books from Barnes and Noble, this could be a good Kindle alternative. Otherwise, I’d still recommend the Kobo Libra Colour to everybody else. The $199.99 Nook Glowlight 4 Plus is a good e-reader with a lot to offer, including a lovely 300ppi screen, waterproofing, physical page-turning buttons, and even a headphone jack. However, it’s just not as snappy, which makes setting it up, buying books from the device itself, and navigating the interface a slow ordeal. It didn’t help that the screen sometimes froze, too, which meant I had to restart the device while in the middle of a book.

Boox Palma 2

Despite all the advantages of E Ink display technology, your smartphone is probably still a more convenient device for reading given how pocket-friendly it is. The Boox Palma 2 is a smartphone-sized E Ink device that’s just as easy to slip into a pocket, but with more capabilities than an e-reader. Its 6.3-inch E Ink display is great for reading books, but the $279.99 Palma 2 also runs Android 13 so you can install productivity apps like email and messaging — assuming you’ve got access to Wi-Fi, of course, because the compact e-reader lacks cellular connectivity. If you already have the original Palma, the sequel isn’t worth the upgrade. But if you’re looking for a smaller alternative to Kindles and Kobos, the Palma 2 could be worth the splurge. – Andrew Liszewski, Senior Reporter 

Boox Go 10.3

The $409.99 Onyx Boox Go 10.3 is another ad-free ebook reader you can use to take notes. It’s excellent as a note-taking device, and it offers an impressively wide range of writing tools and more prebuilt notebook templates than Kobo’s Elipsa 2E. Jotting down notes using the built-in notebook felt more akin to writing on paper as well, and its slim design makes the device feel more like a traditional notebook. Like all Boox devices, it also provides quick access to the Google Play Store, so you can download multiple reading apps — including both Kindle and Kobo apps. The slate’s crisp 300ppi display is sharper than that of the Kobo Elipsa 2E, too, which is a plus.

However, in comparison to the easy-to-use Elipsa 2E, the Go 10.3 lacks a front light and comes with a steeper learning curve. Notes you take on a Kindle or Kobo device won’t transfer over (and vice versa), and you can’t annotate books in either app using the Boox. I also felt like access to Google Play can be a double-edged sword as it grants easy access to distracting apps, including games, streaming services, and TikTok. It’s too slow to use the latter, but it’s fast and comfortable enough that I found myself playing around with the Word Search app far too often. For me personally, I need my e-reader to be devoid of such distractions — it’s one of the biggest things that distinguishes it from a tablet, after all. But if you’ve got more self-control than I do, the Go 10.3 could be worth a look.

Boox Go Color 7 Gen II

In April, Boox introduced the Go Color 7 Gen II, which retails for $279.99. This water-resistant e-reader offers a 300ppi display that drops to 150ppi when displaying color content, much like its Kobo and Kindle rivals. However, similar to the Kobo Libra Colour, this ad-free model offers physical-page turning buttons and supports note-taking. A stylus isn’t included, so you’ll need to spend an extra $45.99 for Boox’s pressure-sensitive InkSense pen if you want to take notes. And, like other Boox devices, it runs on Android, giving you access to a wide range of apps and online bookstores through the Google Play Store.

While I appreciated not having to sideload my Kindle and Kobo library, along with greater flexibility to fine-tune color settings, I ultimately prefer the Kobo Libra Colour. In my testing, the Go Color 7 Gen II felt frustratingly sluggish by comparison to the Libra Colour, which is disappointing given the Boox costs $50 more. Responsiveness is a core part of the reading experience for me, so I’d only recommend Boox’s model to readers who value having Android app flexibility over performance.

What’s coming next

• Amazon recently announced three new versions of its note-taking Kindle Scribe: the $629.99 Kindle Scribe Colorsoft, which features a color screen; a $499.99 monochrome model with a front light; and an entry-level version without one for $429.99. All three offer a thinner design and a larger 11-inch display, along with a new AI-powered search tool that makes it easy to quickly summarize documents. Amazon has also updated the homescreen with a Quick Notes section and redesigned the stylus so it’s bigger and rounder, which should lend itself to a more intuitive writing experience. Read our hands-on impressions.
• The new Boox P6 Pro is the company’s latest smartphone-sized e-reader. It comes with a color E ink screen and goes for around $463 in China, with Boox selling a cheaper black-and-white version for roughly $393. Both configurations come with LTE connectivity and stylus support, run a version of Android 13 out of the box, and feature a 16-megapixel camera for scanning documents. They also offer 128GB of storage that can be expanded up to 2TB using the SIM card tray, which conveniently doubles as a microSD slot. The P6 Pro recently launched in China, but Boox hasn’t shared details regarding a US launch date. Read our initial IFA impressions.

Update, October 14th: Adjusted pricing / availability and added new details regarding Amazon’s latest Kindle Scribe models and the Boox P6 Pro. Andrew Liszewski also contributed to this post.

🛸 Recommended Intelligence Resource

As UAP researchers and tech enthusiasts, we’re always seeking tools and resources to enhance our investigations and stay ahead of emerging technologies. Check out this resource that fellow researchers have found valuable.

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