This is The Internet Report, where we analyze outages and trends across the Internet through the lens of ThousandEyes Internet and Cloud Intelligence. I’ll be here every other week, sharing the latest outage numbers and highlighting a few interesting outages. This week, we’re taking a break from our usual programming for a special conversation on the impacts that even 1% of packet loss can have on a service’s performance and customer experience, featuring insights from studies conducted by the ThousandEyes Internet Research Team and special guest Kemal Sanjta. As always, you can read more below or tune in to the podcast for firsthand commentary.
Internet Outages & Trends
The Impact of 1% Packet Loss? It Might Be More Than You Think.
Network operations teams understand that packet loss can affect network flows and overall service performance. However, how much packet loss is truly problematic? Based on our experience, while major spikes in packet loss raise legitimate concerns, network engineers typically disregard smaller percentages of packet loss, such as 1% or 2%.
This might be a mistake.
Findings from the ThousandEyes Internet Research Team’s studies suggest that even 1 or 2% packet loss can significantly impact user experience.
Tune in to this week’s podcast episode for a deep dive into what we discovered and what NetOps teams should consider doing based on these findings. We’ll discuss:
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How we tested the effects of 1% and 2% packet loss for both symmetric and asymmetric network paths
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The significant impacts that even 1% of packet loss can have—in our symmetric tests, on average, 1% of packet loss led to a 70.7% decrease in throughput
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Why NetOps shouldn’t overlook low levels of packet loss, instead taking the time to investigate their potential consequences on the overall service delivery chain and customer experience
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Insights from our follow-up study using BBR vs. CUBIC, and the benefits BBR may provide
And for more information, explore all three parts of our Path Quality blog series:
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Path Quality Part 1: The Surprising Impact of 1% Packet Loss
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Path Quality Part 2: Understanding the Impact of Packet Loss on Applications
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Path Quality Part 3: Is BBR the Future of Congestion Avoidance?
By the Numbers
Let’s close by taking a look at some of the global trends ThousandEyes observed across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks, and edge networks over three recent weeks (March 17 - April 6):
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Following an initial rise, global outages decreased during this period. In the first week (March 17-23), ThousandEyes observed a 76% increase in outages, which rose from 378 to 664. However, this trend reversed in the following week as outages began to decline. During the week of March 24-30, outages dropped from 664 to 525, marking a 21% decrease compared to the previous week. This decline continued in the subsequent week (March 31 - April 6), with the number of outages further decreasing from 525 to 404, representing a 23% reduction compared to the prior week.
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The United States followed a similar pattern. Initially, outages increased from 154 to 287, reflecting an 86% rise compared to the previous week. However, like the global trend, U.S. outages also experienced a decrease in the following weeks. During the week of March 24-30, outages fell from 287 to 212, representing a 26% decrease. This was followed by a 29% decrease during the week of March 31 - April 6, when outages declined from 212 to 150.
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From March 17 to April 6, an average of 41% of all network outages occurred in the United States, down from the 44% reported in the previous period (March 3 - 16). This 41% figure continues a trend observed throughout 2024, where U.S.-based outages typically accounted for at least 40% of all recorded outages.
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In March, a total of 2,110 outages were observed globally, representing a 32% increase from the 1,595 outages recorded in February. In the United States, outages increased by 11%, rising from 811 in February to 901 in March. This reflects a similar trend seen in previous years, as total outages both globally and in the U.S. also rose from February to March.
