The number of network disruptions across various elements of the internet rose sharply beginning in March due to the COVID-19 pandemic — but they often indicated traffic engineering work on the part of various service providers to adjust to changing demand and didn’t necessarily result in systemic performance degradation, a new report from ThousandEye found.
“Considering the sudden, unprecedented change in traffic flows brought on by the pandemic, the Internet has held up surprisingly well overall,” the report concluded. ThousandEyes did observe a “precipitous rise” in network disruptions starting in March, but said that the increase “should not be taken as an indication that Internet infrastructures did not ‘hold up’ under the strain of rapidly shifted traffic patterns” because its evidence showed that the increase in disruptions — often outside business hours and on weekends — were not due to network strain, but instead “the result of operators adjusting their networks to accommodate changes in traffic pattern and load.”
