Scale of impact of Verizon outages exposed in Cloudflare report
Cloudflare has released details outlining the extent of the recent Verizon outage, which has affected millions of telecom users in the US.
Verizon customers across the country first experienced connectivity issues on September 30, with users reporting their devices were stuck in SOS mode during the outage. At the time, Downdetector data showed a huge spike in reports across the country, and customers were unable to make or receive calls from mobile devices.
Although the issue has since been fixed by Verizon, an analysis from Cloudflare has now revealed the significant impact it had on connectivity in the US.
Verizon outage
In one blog post David Belson, Head of Data Insight at Cloudflare, analyzed the outage in detail, analyzing data from AS6167 (CELLCO), an autonomous system used by Cloudflare to manage its mobile network.
Based on this data, Cloudflare was able to track HTTP requests from the autonomous system and shed light on the extent of connectivity issues affecting individual cities and regions.
“To better understand how the outage affected Internet traffic on Verizon’s network, we looked at AS6167’s HTTP request volume, independent of geographic location, as well as AS6167’s traffic in several cities that were reported to be heaviest were affected,” Belson wrote. .
Notably, Cloudflare did not detect any “noticeable change” in request volumes as of 9 a.m. ET, around the time the issue was first reported by Verizon in a statement on social media.
However, in the following hours, Belson revealed that Cloudflare Radar reported a 5% drop in HTTP requests at 11 a.m., and then another 9% drop over the next three hours.
This reduced request volume lasted for several hours until 5:00 PM when Verizon confirmed it
Verizon confirmed that engineers were working on a fix and services were being restored to affected users. However, this was not the case for users in many locations in the US.
Belson revealed that users in Denver, Chicago, Omaha and Phoenix, for example, experienced acute connectivity issues during the outage.
“Decreases in request traffic beginning around 11:00 ET (15:00 UTC) are evident in cities such as Los Angeles, Seattle, Omaha, Denver, Phoenix, Minneapolis, Indianapolis, and Chicago,” Belson wrote.
“The difference in traffic in Omaha was the largest, with a decrease of about 30%, while other cities saw a decrease of 10 to 20%.”
Which services are affected and what caused the Verizon outage?
According to Cloudflare, the majority of users experienced acute issues with voice services, which Belson noted “may have been more significantly impacted” than data services during the incident.
“We saw some declines in request traffic in the affected cities, but none experienced a complete outage,” he noted.
The exact cause of the outage has yet to be determined and at the time of Cloudflare’s analysis, no specific information had been provided regarding the cause of the incident.