Web Outages Tracked Catchpoint’s Live Internet Outage Map

The network is constantly connected. This means that the Internet is always on, except when it is off. To be clear, the Internet never actually “turns off” as such because the cloud service provider’s data center servers that run the data properties that feed the Web its juice are always on – and they have surplus electricity supply to cover national times. network disconnection. Our computers and mobile devices are as good as always on, so in theory, there’s no interruption to the eternal flame of the Internet.

But as we know, the web can seem down when an outage occurs due to one of the planet’s global internet service providers experiencing a system malfunction, misconfiguration or miscalculation in load balancing, provisioning of service capacity or when a large software code error occurs. When this happens, we users tend to say “the web is down” and the technicians running the cloud-based web resources we now rely on say there’s an “outage” and it inevitably does. service interruption.

Which bar doesn’t have beer?

Wouldn’t we (as a user community) be able to channel and manage our internet usage more competently if we knew more precisely when and where internet outages were occurring? Given this kind of knowledge in any other scenario, we’d probably avoid restaurants that we know are out of stock, supermarkets that are out of stock, and bars that are dry while channeling our habit elsewhere. Why shouldn’t the same logic apply to internet consumption? Web performance monitoring company Catchpoint thinks you shouldn’t.

The company announced this month the launch of its Live Global Internet Outage Map, a hands-free AI-powered dashboard designed to provide a real-time snapshot of the health of the hundreds of global internet services that run our lives. daily. This tool provides users with visibility into outages that may impact businesses, retail or consumer websites, major Internet services, or any web-based entity. The service does not require user registration, but is comprehensive enough to provide real-time global data from the past 24 hours, sampling hundreds of services monitored by Catchpoint’s own Internet Sonar capability, which provides deeper insights into paying customers.

“With the release of our Live Internet Outage Map, Catchpoint is pleased to provide the community with free, real-time global insights into the health of some of the world’s largest internet platforms, from Facebook to Amazon and so on,” said Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of Catchpoint. “Offering a subset of the features from [our own] At Internet Sonar Service, we hope to provide businesses with the insight they need to answer the question, “Am I or something else?” Today we need to understand that visibility into the health of the Internet infrastructure and the layers that drive Software as -a-Service functions for global business are key to staying competitive.â€

How “healthy” is my Instagram?

This global connectivity map is built to provide insights into the health of many internet services and platforms, including social media platforms such as Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook; e-commerce services from Amazon, Apple and Walmart; major finance functions from major players including Visa, PayPal, Bank of America; entertainment apps like Netflix, Disney Plus and Spotify; plus travel services including airlines, hotels, booking sites, etc.

Daoudi says this technology allows users to proactively respond to outages that could disrupt business operations. “Unlike other trackers that rely on delayed, crowd-sourced reports, the Catchpoint map uses data from millions of real-time tests conducted in the world’s largest independent active surveillance network. This results in a real-time interactive status report powered by AI,” he notes.

Aggregated Data Dilemmas

Catchpoint’s use of real-time tests is interesting. Many of us will have ridden in an Uber (or another rideshare service) and watched the driver avoid traffic hotspots that are flagged by data inputs collected by other drivers. This is (arguably) a useful application of crowdsourced information streams, although it is inevitably subject to the human error that Catchpoint insists we must avoid if we are using the web, e.g. in a world where the cloud and the web carry out the mission. -critical services to business organizations and public bodies around the world, we need to go beyond community alarms about the “heavy weight in Interstate-90 traffic,” even if they are useful on another level.

“Users receive immediate outage information without waiting for third-party providers to post (often) delayed reports, providing timely insights when they are most needed. Our data is derived from multiple tests conducted on Catchpoint’s Global Observational Network and curated by our AI correlation engine,” the company wrote in a technical statement.

To reduce the potential for false positives here, Catchpoint says its Internet Sonar AI-branded analytics engine carefully examines outage data to validate results, avoiding inaccuracies that could mislead decision-making. The full commercial version of Internet Sonar monitors thousands of additional Internet services in additional categories, including Internet infrastructure (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc.), SaaS (AlaaS, UCaaS, SECaS, etc.), marketing technology (analytics , ad serving, video, etc.), plus also APIs and developer tools. The complete platform also allows for customizable time frames, detailed notifications, and broader integration into various other software systems.

As part of a busy summer update period, Catchpoint has also detailed a new set of web performance capabilities in its web performance monitoring platform. By incorporating WebPageTest’s web performance optimization features into its platform, Catchpoint now provides visibility into web performance, covering everything from front-end code to end-user experience, including detailed views into the “stack of internet” from thousands of locations worldwide, all within a single dashboard.

MTTR matters

The acronym that enterprises will pull their use of Internet outages here is the MTTR course, which stands for Mean Time to Resolution, which obviously really matters. Before this R factor, there is MTTI for mean time to identification and this pair of digital metrics taken together and driven by a technology that serves this space as detailed here is a key step for businesses that need to maintain their connection as high as possible. as much as possible and, most importantly, enable them to see windows where they may need to balance dropouts.

As we said at the beginning here, the web never experiences a formal shutdown, but knowing where the “outages” are and being able to navigate around them can be a turn-on.