ThousandEyes 2026 Outage Report: Cloud Incidents Rise While ISP Networks Steady

Every week, Cisco's ThousandEyes observability platform measures how ISPs, cloud providers, collaboration apps and edge services — DNS, content delivery networks and security-as-a-service — are holding up, and Network World publishes the running tally. The latest reading, covering August 17–23, logged 534 global network outage events, down 2% from 546 the week before. On paper, that reads as stability. Underneath the headline, though, the mix is shifting in ways hosting buyers should notice: ISP outages fell sharply, while public cloud incidents jumped 17% globally and 22% in the United States. If you operate websites, VPS instances, WordPress stacks or dedicated servers, the uncomfortable conclusion is that the layer you control least — cloud control planes and their routing fabric — is increasingly where availability actually breaks.

A Closer Look at the August Numbers

The week of August 17–23 broke down cleanly into two opposing trends. Globally, ISP outages dropped from 298 to 252, a 15% decline; in the U.S., they fell 12%, from 169 to 148. Public cloud network outages moved the other way, rising from 162 to 189 worldwide and from 143 to 174 stateside. Collaboration app networks were nearly irrelevant, with a single global event and zero in the U.S. The American market accounted for 366 of the 534 total events, edging up 2% week-over-week.

Zooming out, the summer has been noisy. Weekly totals ran 502, 546 and now 534 across the last three weeks — well above the 199-event low recorded during the December 29–January 4 holiday lull, and below the 610-event peak in the week of July 20–26. The cloud category has been especially volatile: global public cloud outages sat at just 87 in the week ending May 31, then reached 274 in the week of July 13–19 — roughly a threefold swing inside two months. Since edge infrastructure such as DNS and CDNs is folded into these tallies, any sustained rise in cloud events is a direct signal for hosting uptime, not an abstract enterprise concern.

Arelion's Rough Stretch Shows How Transit Risk Spreads

Two notable incidents anchored the latest report, and both deserve attention from anyone who buys bandwidth or hosts in Europe. On August 21, Arelion — the Stockholm-headquartered Tier 1 carrier formerly known as Telia Carrier — suffered an outage first observed around 9:25 PM EDT, initially centered on nodes in Chicago. Atlanta joined within five minutes; after briefly clearing, Chicago flapped again, pulling in Seattle, then Dallas, San Jose, Sweden and the U.K. The disruption totaled one hour and 21 minutes of outage conditions spread across a three-hour-and-ten-minute window before clearing near 12:35 AM EDT, with downstream customers and partners impacted across roughly thirty countries, including France, Germany, the Netherlands, the U.K., Italy, Poland, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, Ireland and Sweden itself. It was also Arelion's second appearance in as many weeks — a 20-minute event hit on August 14 — following similar incidents in March, May, June and early July. The report does not disclose root causes, so treat speculation accordingly.

Cox Communications also appeared twice, with short, Chicago-centered disruptions on August 11 and August 17, the latter reaching partners in the U.K., Austria, Germany and Denmark. One quiet pattern runs through months of data: Chicago nodes recur as the apparent epicenter for incidents involving Cox, Comcast, Cogent, AT&T and others. The report offers no explanation for this clustering — it may reflect topology or measurement placement — but it is a fair prompt to ask your own providers hard questions about upstream diversity and reroute capability. Liberty Global, the Dutch-headquartered ISP group, likewise showed in late July how a single-carrier event centered in Miami can ripple across three continents for over an hour.

In the Cloud, Change Management Breaks More Than Hardware Does

Public cloud incidents made up more than a third of last week's global total, and the 2026 record suggests a consistent theme: software changes and configuration errors, not failing hardware. On July 23, a bug during routine maintenance caused Microsoft to remove IP routes between its West US datacenter and its WAN from more devices than intended; a rollback began around 1:45 PM EDT, with the network restored by 2:26 PM and services fully recovered by 3:41 PM. In February, a Cloudflare automation task accidentally withdrew customer BYOIP advertisements from the internet, causing roughly 100 minutes of connection timeouts.

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.

Early August added a bigger entry: a broad Azure outage beginning on a Monday evening, where a misconfiguration in Microsoft-managed storage accounts triggered cascading failures across virtual machine operations, managed identities and developer workflows, stretching past ten hours. Context matters here — AWS previously absorbed more than 15 hours of severe impact when a DNS problem rendered the DynamoDB API unreliable.

The operational lesson repeats across vendors. ThousandEyes' review of 2025's worst incidents found that staggered configuration refreshes produce intermittent global instability rather than clean on/off failures, and that perfectly healthy servers can sit unreachable because resolvers lack DNS records. Its blunt guidance still stands: if the network seems healthy but users report problems, look to the backend. For hosting buyers, that means assuming API and control-plane outages will happen — and designing so your workload survives them.

What Hosting Buyers and Operators Should Do Next

First, monitor from the outside in. Synthetic checks from multiple geographic vantage points, with DNS resolution tested separately from HTTP delivery, catch the partial-degradation patterns that single-server uptime monitors miss. Second, interrogate upstream diversity before signing with a European host or colocation provider: ask which transit mix they run — Arelion, Cogent, Zayo, GTT, Lumen, NTT, TATA, PCCW and Hurricane Electric all feature in 2026's incident log — and whether they can shed a failed upstream quickly. Third, treat control-plane loss as a first-class scenario: export configurations and machine images off-provider, keep break-glass access that does not depend on the vendor's identity stack, and maintain backup paths you have actually restored from. Fourth, run DNS across independent providers with sane TTLs ahead of planned changes. Fifth, patch your edge and security gear; separate Network World reporting flags two critical Cisco Firewall Management Center flaws — CVE-2026-20079 and CVE-2026-20131, both CVSS 10, both enabling unauthenticated root access via the web interface, neither with a workaround — so until patched, those interfaces should not touch the public internet. Finally, read SLAs realistically: service credits rarely offset lost revenue, so engineer for the outage rather than the refund.

Quick checklist for hosting teams

Run external synthetic monitoring from several regions, separating DNS checks from application checks
Confirm your provider's transit diversity and documented failover behavior
Keep off-site configuration exports and image copies for emergency rebuilds
Distribute authoritative DNS across independent providers
Patch management interfaces immediately or isolate them from the public internet
Test restore paths quarterly, not just backups

The internet did not break in August — 534 weekly outage events is a normal summer reading, and collaboration platforms stayed largely quiet. What changed is where the risk sits. ISP networks steadied while cloud incidents climbed, and the year's most damaging failures traced back to maintenance bugs, misconfigurations and routing changes rather than burned hardware. For hosting buyers and operators, resilience is no longer a line item to negotiate after price; it is the purchasing criterion. Choose providers on demonstrated redundancy, verify their upstreams yourself, and assume the next outage will begin in someone else's change pipeline — possibly hours away from your servers, and entirely invisible to your internal dashboards until customers notice first.

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