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 ...