2026 Network Outage Report: What ThousandEyes Data Means for Hosting and Infrastructure Buyers

Cisco ThousandEyes has published its weekly internet health check for 2026, and the latest data through late August shows a mixed picture for anyone running websites, VPS instances, or cloud infrastructure. During the week of August 17–23, ThousandEyes tracked 534 global network outage events across ISPs, public cloud, collaboration, and edge networks—a 2% dip from the prior week’s 546, but U.S. outages rose 2% to 366. More concerning for hosting buyers: public cloud network outages jumped 17% globally and 22% in the U.S. For European and global operators, these disruptions translate into latency spikes, failed migrations, and intermittent timeouts. This editorial breaks down the trends, notable carrier and cloud incidents, and what practical steps sysadmins should take to protect uptime.

For a more detailed walkthrough of this part of the topic, read Cloudflare report: DDoS attacks explode in 2025 – What hosting customers should know and do.

Global Outage Trends: ISP Stability Improves, Cloud Network Disruptions Climb

The most recent full week in the research pack (August 17–23) shows ISP outages actually improving. Globally, ISP outages dropped from 298 to 252 week‑over‑week, a 15% decrease. In the U.S., they fell from 169 to 148, a 12% decrease. Collaboration app networks remained a non‑event: just one global outage and zero in the U.S. The problem area is public cloud network outages. ThousandEyes counted 189 global public cloud outages, up from 162 the prior week (+17%). In the U.S., the rise was sharper: 174 outages, up 22% from 143.

That pattern is not a one‑week blip. Looking back, the week of June 1–7 was especially violent: total global outages hit 483, up 69% from 286, with U.S. outages at 319 (＋70%). ISP outages globally rose 70% to 265, and U.S. ISP outages nearly doubled to 187. Public cloud outages that week grew 52% globally and 23% in the U.S. Even as later weeks calmed, cloud‑side instability kept climbing in windows such as July 6–12, when global public cloud outages rose 72% to 234, and U.S. ones jumped 84% to 221.

For hosting buyers, the takeaway is clear: the last mile (ISP) may be steadier, but the infrastructure your VPS, dedicated server, or managed WordPress instance sits on is experiencing more network‑layer events. If your provider concentrates workloads in a single hyperscaler region, your realistic risk is now skewed toward cloud‑internal routing and edge failures rather than just residential broadband dips.

Tier 1 Transit and Hosting Provider Incidents: Arelion, Cogent, Zayo, and More

The detailed notable‑outage logs reveal how interdependent hosting supply chains are. Arelion (formerly Telia Carrier, headquartered in Stockholm) appears repeatedly. On August 21, it suffered a disruption lasting 1 hour 21 minutes over a 3‑hour 10‑minute window, first observed at 9:25 PM EDT centered on Chicago nodes, then spreading to Atlanta, Seattle, Dallas, San Jose, Sweden, and the U.K., impacting customers in 30‑plus regions from France to Japan. A similar Arelion event on July 2 lasted 51 minutes over 1 hour 50 minutes with broad European and Asian impact.

Cogent Communications, Zayo Group, Lumen, Comcast, AT&T, Charter (Spectrum), Cox, Verizon Business, Hurricane Electric, TATA Communications, GTT, NTT America, and Unitas Global (now PacketFabric) all show multiple entries. Cox Communications had a 24‑minute Chicago‑centered outage on August 17 affecting partners in the U.S., Mexico, and the U.K. Zayo’s Seattle‑based outage on August 5 lasted 17 minutes but expanded downstream impact.

Two incidents are especially relevant to hosting operators. Madgenius, a U.S.‑based hosting and infrastructure provider in Apple Valley, MN, had outages on January 16 (1h16m) and February 13 (1h11m) centered on Columbus, OH nodes, impacting downstream partners in the U.S. and Netherlands. Cloudflare’s February 20 event was a BYOIP failure where an automated maintenance task withdrew customer IP advertisements for about 1 hour 40 minutes, causing connection timeouts for end users. If your dedicated server or VPS uses Cloudflare BYOIP or sits behind these transit paths, you can experience packet loss even when your own machine is healthy.

Cloud Provider Network Failures and Backend Disruptions

Cloud control planes and backend services are not immune. On July 23, Microsoft experienced a West US network outage: a routine maintenance bug removed IP routes between the West US datacenter and its WAN, expanding from San Jose, Los Angeles, Dallas, New York, Atlanta, and Cleveland to more nodes. Microsoft rolled back the change at 1:45 PM EDT, restored network by 2:26 PM EDT, and fully recovered services by 3:41 PM EDT. A separate Network World report in the research pack notes an August 11 Azure outage where a misconfiguration in Microsoft‑managed storage accounts triggered cascading failures across virtual machine operations, managed identities, and developer workflows for over 10 hours. Microsoft 365 also had an April 2 disruption when Central U.S. infrastructure entered a degraded state, breaking office.com and admin center access for 1 hour 14 minutes.

Other SaaS/backend events include ServiceNow (March 6, 1h3m), GitHub (February 26, 39 minutes), and Google Gemini degradation on June 10 (backend, not network). For WordPress hosting or any CMS on cloud VMs, these are not abstract: a managed identity failure can block your site from reading storage; a regional route withdrawal can make your admin panel unreachable even if the web server process is fine. The research also reminds us that “if the network seems healthy but users are experiencing issues, the problem might be in the backend” (ThousandEyes takeaway from 2025 archived insights included in the pack).

Operational Guidance for Hosting Buyers and Sysadmins

Given the data, hosting buyers should treat network resilience as a procurement criterion, not an afterthought. First, ask your VPS or dedicated server provider which Tier 1 transit carriers they peer with. If the answer is a single carrier like Arelion or Cogent, consider a second provider with diverse paths or use BGP multihoming if you run your own ASN. Second, for cloud hosting, avoid single‑region deployments for production. The July 23 Microsoft West US case shows how one maintenance bug can cascade; use multi‑AZ or multi‑region architectures with replicated databases.

Third, monitoring must be external. ThousandEyes shares public interactive views for each incident; self‑hosted synthetic checks from Frankfurt, London, New York, and Singapore will catch latency before tickets arrive. Fourth, DNS and CDN redundancy matters. The Cloudflare BYOIP withdrawal shows that even anycast can fail if advertisements are pulled; keep a secondary DNS provider and a fallback proxy. Finally, review SLA credits, renewal pricing, and support quality. An outage is only as tolerable as the provider’s communication and compensation. The tradeoff is cost: multi‑region and multi‑transit designs raise spend, but the alternative is unpredictable downtime during precisely the weeks outages spike.

Key Takeaways and Practical Checklist

Map your hosting stack’s upstream transit: confirm whether your VPS/cloud host relies heavily on Arelion, Cogent, or Zayo, and seek diversity.
Track public cloud outage trends; the week of June 1–7 and July 6–12 showed +50–80% cloud network outage jumps—schedule critical migrations outside such windows.
Deploy external synthetic monitoring from at least three geographies to detect routing failures early.
For Cloudflare BYOIP or similar, maintain a secondary anycast or DNS failover to avoid IP‑withdrawal lockouts.
Keep tested backups and a documented migration path to an alternate host or region; verify restore time quarterly.

The ThousandEyes 2026 data makes one point undeniable: network and cloud outages are persistent, geographically wide, and increasingly concentrated in the public cloud layer. Hosting buyers who assume “the ISP is fine, so my site is fine” are exposed. Practical redundancy, transparent provider choice, and continuous monitoring remain the only reliable defenses for uptime‑sensitive operations.

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