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

Cisco ThousandEyes publishes weekly internet health checks that track outage events across ISPs, public cloud networks, collaboration app networks, and edge services such as DNS and CDN. The 2026 dataset compiled by Network World, spanning late December 2025 through late August 2026, shows that network disruptions remain a constant operational risk for anyone running websites, VPS instances, or cloud workloads. While global outage counts fluctuated week to week—from a low of 199 in early January to 534 in mid‑August—the underlying trend includes sharp spikes in public cloud network outages and recurring transit provider failures. For hosting buyers, these events are not abstract statistics: they directly affect latency, reachability, migration success, and SLA compliance. This article breaks down the data and explains practical steps to reduce exposure.

Related ServerSpan guide: Cloudflare Global Outage November 18, 2025: Why Centralized Infrastructure Is a Single Point of Failure (And What VPS Hosting Gets Right).

The 2026 Outage Landscape: Weekly Trends and Category Breakdown

ThousandEyes counts outage events across four categories: ISP networks, public cloud provider networks, collaboration app networks, and edge networks (including DNS, CDN, and security‑as‑a‑service). The weekly reporting period begins with December 29, 2025–January 4, 2026: 199 global outages, 71 in the U.S., with ISP outages at 105 globally and public cloud at 59. One week later (January 5–11), global events jumped 28% to 255, and U.S. events surged 90% to 135. That volatility continued.

By early June (June 1–7), global outages hit 483, with U.S. at 319—a 70% U.S. week‑over‑week increase largely driven by ISP outages (187, up 97%). Public cloud outages that week were 132 global (up 52%). The following month, the week of July 6–12 showed a striking 72% global increase in public cloud network outages to 234, and an 84% U.S. increase to 221. That signals cloud‑side routing or capacity issues, not just last‑mile ISP problems.

The most recent week in the research, August 17–23, recorded 534 global outages (down 2% from 546) but 366 U.S. outages (up 2%). ISP outages globally fell 15% to 252, while public cloud network outages rose 17% globally to 189 and 22% in the U.S. to 174. Collaboration app outages remained low (one global event). The takeaway for hosting operators: ISP stability improved slightly, but cloud‑network reliability worsened in the same period.

Cloud, CDN, and Transit: Where Hosting Stacks Feel the Pain

A WordPress site on a single VPS, a managed Kubernetes cluster, or a bare‑metal server in a colocation facility all depend on layered networks. When a public cloud network outage occurs, control planes, load balancers, and sometimes data‑path routing fail. The research confirms a Microsoft incident on July 23 affecting services running in Microsoft’s West US region. Microsoft identified the root cause as a bug encountered during routine maintenance that removed IP routes between the West US datacenter and their WAN from more devices than intended. The disruption lasted about one hour and three minutes, with full recovery after rollback. That is a concrete example of cloud maintenance causing multi‑region latency and timeouts.

Edge networks are equally critical. On February 20, Cloudflare experienced a BYOIP service disruption caused by a bug in an automated internal maintenance task that withdrew customer IP advertisements, producing connection timeouts for approximately one hour and 40 minutes. For sites using Cloudflare for DNS or CDN, that meant unreachable front ends despite origin server health.

Transit providers—Tier 1 carriers such as Arelion (formerly Telia Carrier), Cogent, Zayo, GTT, Lumen, Hurricane Electric, TATA, and PCCW—route traffic between hosts and users. Numerous outages in the dataset centered on nodes in Chicago, Dallas, Ashburn, Los Angeles, and New York. For example, Arelion had multi‑region outages on August 21 (one hour 21 minutes over a three‑hour window) and earlier on July 2 (51 minutes). Cogent, Zayo, and GTT appear repeatedly with short but geographically wide impacts. We are not given root causes for most transit events, and we will not speculate; the operational fact is that downstream hosting providers and their customers experienced increased latency or black‑holing.

Notable Incidents That Hit Hosting and Infrastructure Operators

Beyond the big carriers, the report includes providers directly adjacent to hosting buyers. Madgenius, described as a U.S.‑based hosting and infrastructure service provider, had outages on January 16 (one hour 16 minutes) and February 13 (one hour 11 minutes), both centered on Columbus, OH nodes and impacting downstream partners. That is a reminder that smaller infrastructure firms can take downstream sites offline even if the customer’s own server is fine.

Other notable events: Cox Communications ISP outages on August 17 (24 minutes) and earlier dates; Charter/Spectrum regional disruptions; Comcast node failures in Chicago and Los Angeles; AT&T and Verizon Business outages affecting partner networks; and GitHub (February 26) and ServiceNow (March 6) incidents that interrupted developer and IT workflows. A Microsoft 365 admin center disruption on April 2 stemmed from infrastructure in Central U.S. entering a degraded state.

The pattern is clear: outages are often brief (minutes) but can recur across nodes, extend over hours in cumulative windows, and propagate through downstream partners. Hosting buyers should not assume that an SLA‑backed provider is immune—their upstream transit or CDN might be the weak link.

Practical Defenses for Website Owners and Sysadmins

You cannot prevent a transit provider from withdrawing routes, but you can reduce blast radius. First, map your dependencies: ask your VPS or managed host which transit carriers and IX points they use. If everything rides on one Tier 1 with frequent entries in these reports, consider multi‑region deployment. Second, decouple DNS from your hosting plane. Use a secondary DNS provider or a managed DNS service with anycast and health checks. Third, for CDN, consider multi‑CDN or at least a fallback origin that does not depend on the same edge vendor that failed in the Cloudflare case.

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.

Monitoring is essential. External synthetic checks from multiple geographies—similar to ThousandEyes but available via cheaper uptime tools—will tell you when latency spikes or paths change. For WordPress hosting, keep offsite backups and a tested restore procedure; a DNS or routing outage is not the time to discover missing snapshots. Finally, read the SLA: does your host credit you for upstream network outages, or only for hardware faults? Many do not, so operational risk remains yours.

Key Takeaways & Practical Checklist:

• Audit your hosting provider’s upstream transit, CDN, and DNS dependencies using public outage reports.
• Deploy secondary DNS or multi‑CDN failover to survive edge‑network withdrawals.
• Monitor latency and packet loss from at least three external vantage points.
• Review SLA terms: confirm whether network‑transit outages qualify for credits.
• Maintain tested offsite backups and a rollback plan for DNS and routing changes.
• Prefer cloud regions or VPS providers with verified multi‑AZ and diverse transit.

Conclusion: The 2026 ThousandEyes outage data is a sobering reminder that the internet’s middle layers—transit, cloud WANs, and CDN edges—fail often and without warning. For HostXMe readers running production sites, the lesson is to architect for redundancy, measure from outside, and treat every provider’s network as a shared risk. Awareness of these trends helps you choose hosting that stays reachable when the backbone shakes.