The risk of ever-increasing internet outages (2024)

More widespread and longer-lasting, large-scale internet outages are becoming increasingly impressive and worrying. This is what millions of inhabitants of Grenoble (southeastern France), Besançon (eastern France), Reims (northeastern France) and Strasbourg (northeastern France) experienced on April 27, after several sections of fiber optics were sabotaged.

An investigation was immediately launched, among other things, for "damage to property likely to harm the fundamental interests of the nation." In an increasingly connected world, being deprived of internet access can quickly turn into a nightmare for companies and individuals alike.

ThousandEyes, a U.S. company specializing in identifying network issues, has compiled a list of the largest service outages around the world in 2021.

Leading the way was the seven-hour outage of Meta's services (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp), which occurred on October 4 and affected "hundreds of millions, if not billions of users" across the customer base of the company's corporate partners.

Rounding out the podium is Fastly (a service that speeds up website loading times), whose 85% of customers, including Le Monde, The New York Times, The Guardian, GitHub, Twitch, Reddit and PayPal, had their websites made wholly or partially unavailable for an hour on June 8; and Amazon Web Services, the world champion of cloud computing, whose successive outages on December 7 and 15 disrupted the proper functioning of platforms as popular as Netflix and Disney+, but also handicapped the services of its parent company (Amazon Prime, etc.).

In France, another outage made its mark, the fire-related outage that ravaged (French cloud computing company) OVHcloud's facilities on the night of March 9, 2021.

Small number of operators

The list is enough to highlight the variety of contributors that might be at the source of these outages, but also the multiplicity of causes, from equipment sabotage to accidental fires, including, and this is the most frequent cause, human interventions to update equipment software, as was the case for Fastly. "The primary reason for an outage is the complexity of the internet, with its tangle of interdependent solutions," said Nicolas Chagny, president of the Internet Society France association.

Mr. Chagny points out that the scale of the outages reflects not so much a lack of reliability of current technology, but rather their concentration in the hands of a small number of operators: "The cloud has accelerated the concentration on a few very large operators, whose outages affect a large number of people," he said. In the cloud infrastructure sector, three operators alone (Amazon at 33%, Microsoft Azure at 20% and Google at 10%) control more than 60% of the market and continue to grow at great speed by offering more and more additional services to their customers.

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