Internet Outages Projected to Increase During the Year 2021, But Why?

The COVID-19 virus has swept the world by storm forcing more and more people to work from home remotely. With the huge influx of users being online at one time, internet service providers have been struggling to keep up with networking demands. Because of this, Internet Outages are Projected to Increase a lot of internet users have been experiencing issues with connectivity all across the globe. ThousandEyes is a network-monitoring company owned by IT security giant Cisco Systems Inc. that recently released a report stating that in the last week of January 2021, there was an estimated 300 total internet outages reported.

The total number of global internet outages last week was up an estimated 142%. This is a huge increase from the 124 outages that were reported by the company in the first week of January. The United States alone was responsible for an estimated 48% of the global internet outages accounting for 145 service disruptions which makes the fourth straight week for internet outages to run in the domestic market.

For those in areas where internet connectivity is strong, this might not seem like a huge issue. But, if you use popular virtual collaboration apps like Zoom & Skype your productivity can be severely impacted. Just last week, there were about 7 outages reported amongst cloud-based collaboration apps, which is more than the 2 outages reported just the week before.

On January 26th, two of the biggest internet service providers being Verizon & Comcast experienced service outages that impacted customers near Newark, NJ. On the same day, Verizon Communications experienced an outage near the East Coast which the company said was caused by an outage in their node network.

An interesting fact you may want to know about all of these outages is that about 47% of them occurred during local business hours. This is a sharp 13% increase from the previous week alone. Looking at all of these statistics, we can safely say that as more people start coming online due to being restricted by stay-at-home orders, internet outages may continue to increase until large companies find a way to mitigate all of the sudden traffic their networks receive.

If you’ve been impacted by an internet outage that has caused you to miss out on important work related tasks, learning opportunities or more, read our next article on how to keep a stable and secure internet connection through the pandemic.