Weekly Health Reports from ISPs, Cloud Providers and Conference Services – GKZ Hitech

As COVID-19 continues to spread, forcing employees to work from home, ISPs, cloud providers and conference services, such as Unified Communications Providers (UCaaS), are experiencing increased traffic.

Thousand Eyes monitors how these increases affect the breakdowns and performance of these suppliers. It will provide Network World with a summary of the interesting events of the week in providing these services, and Network World will provide a summary here. Stop by next week for another update.

With the increased use of remote access VPNs, the major operators are reporting a dramatic increase in their network traffic – Verizon reporting a 20% increase from week to week and Vodafone reporting a 50% increase.

Although there has not been a corresponding peak in outages in service provider networks, in the past six weeks, there has been a steady increase in outages among several types of providers both in the world and in the United States, all this according to ThousandEyes, which monitors the Internet and the cloud. circulation.

This includes a worrying upward trajectory since the start of March of ISP outages worldwide which coincides with the spread of COVID-19, according to a ThousandEyes blog by Angelique Medina, director of product marketing for the company. FAI outages worldwide hovered around 150 per week between February 10 and March 19, but then increased from just under 200 to around 225 over the next three weeks.

In the United States, these numbers were just over 50 in the first time range and rose to around 100 in the first week of March. "This level at the start of March has been mainly maintained over the past two weeks," writes Medina.

Cogent Communications was an ISP with almost identical large-scale outages on March 11 and 18, with outages for the fairly long period (by Internet standards) of 30 minutes, she wrote.

Hurricane Electric suffered a blackout on March 20 that was less tense and shorter than that of Cogent, but included small disruptions that affected hundreds of sites and services, she said.

The networks of public cloud providers have weathered the effects of COVID-19 well, with a slight increase in the number of outages in the United States, but otherwise relatively similar around the world. The possible reason: Major public cloud providers, such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, have built massive global networks that are incredibly well equipped to handle traffic spikes, Medina wrote. And when these networks have major outages, this is due to routing or changes in the state of the infrastructure, not traffic congestion.

Some providers of collaboration applications – such as Zoom, Webex, MSFT Teams, RingCentral – also encountered performance issues between March 9 and March 20. ThousandEyes does not name them, but lists performance for what it describes as the top three UCaaS Providers. One of them actually showed improvements in terms of availability, latency, packet loss and jitter. The other two "have shown minimal degradation (in the grand scheme of things) on all fronts – which is not surprising given the unprecedented pressure they are undergoing," according to the blog.

Each provider posted peaks in traffic loss during the period ranging from less than 1% to more than 4% in one case. In the case of a provider, outages within its own network increased last week, which means that network issues affecting users were occurring on the infrastructure managed by the provider compared to an external ISP.

Incidents of breakdown within the large networks of UCaaS suppliers are quite rare; however, the recent massive increase in use clearly emphasizes current design limitations. The capacity would generally be increased to respond to new service requests, according to the blog.

Meanwhile, ThousandEyes has introduced new functionality to its Global Internet Outage Map site which is updated every few minutes. It shows recent and ongoing failures.

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