Internet outage trends during Covid-19 pandemic

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The Covid-19 outbreak is now a worldwide issue and the most adopted countermeasure is social distancing: citizens across the world are asked to stay inside their homes in an attempt to limit the outbreak. People from all over the world had to suddenly change routines to “indoor mode”, as almost every activity is moved inside their own houses. This is a big stress for home Internet connectivity, that is now being used for all kinds of purposes. All these indoors online activities are now concentrated into residential broadband, which is experiencing a great strain. Business workflows are also relying on residential connectivity, as opposed to before, when they were leveraging a business broadband connectivity.

After analysing the Internet situation in a few European countries, we are presenting a more in-depth report of Internet disruptions all over the world. This analysis will present the top countries with the worst Internet performance so far.

Fing Internet Outage Detector has been keeping an eye over the worldwide connectivity. The Fing systems analyse in real-time a crowdsourced feed to automatically detect and drill down Internet downtimes, specifically related to certain ISPs or whole regions and countries.

Fing already provides a real-time feed of outage alerts via Twitter (@outagedetect), Fing web, mobile and desktop apps. However, the currently presented analysis is more in-depth since it is based on a moving average comparison. Specifically, the last 30 days period is compared to the 60 days prior, while the last week period is compared to the previous 14 days. Therefore, we performed an ad-hoc trend analysis of worldwide connectivity. The result is a trend report showing which countries are suffering more from Internet outages, or which population is experiencing more trouble in getting access online. The map below shows, in progressive shades of red, which countries have been experiencing the most connectivity issues over the past month.

As you can see, a great part of the world population is affected by Internet disruptions. In particular, the areas shown in the deepest shade of red uncoincidentally correspond to the countries that are strongly affected by the Covid-19 virus right now.

Moreover, the table below shows the list of countries which are most affected by the current situation in terms of Internet drops. You can find the full detailed list in the appendix. The first column presents the trends of the last 30 days, whereas the second column provides the trends of the last week. Positive trends mark an increase of connectivity drops and negative trends show a decrease of disruptions. Therefore, a positive percentage actually describes a worse situation.

Specifically, connectivity in Europe is seriously affected, with only Spain currently keeping up. The United States are fragmented, as you can see in the details: California, Iowa, Hawaii, North Carolina, Delaware, Montana, Arkansas and Winsconsin show an increasing trend of connectivity issues, while the rest of the US remains stable. Central and South America have been suffering as well, showing Mexico, Chile, Argentina and Colombia with a quite high increase of downtimes.

The Fing Outage Detector is fully described on our website.

Monitor your connectivity with Fing Suite

With the recent increase of Internet drops, remember you can monitor your ISP connectivity on your own by visiting internet.fing.com or via the ‘Outages’ option both on Fing App and Fing Desktop as you can see in the following screenshots.

Fing app and Fing Desktop also show notifications of outages happening to your provider in your location, so you are always informed on what is going on. Moreover, Fing Desktop is a global Internet monitoring tool: by downloading and running this new addition to the Fing Suite, you participate in the crowdsourced Internet outage detection system by increasing coverage.

Appendix

 

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