2020 Internet Performance Report

The Internet Performance Report: COVID-19 Impact Edition is a measurement-based study of Internet health, examining the various network infrastructures critical to modern content delivery, namely those belonging to Internet Service Providers (ISPs), as well as cloud, Content Delivery Network (CDN) and Domain Name System (DNS) providers.

By tracking network disruptions and key performance indicators for the various components of the Internet delivery chain between January and July of 2020, this report uncovers important insights into the resilience and behavior of the global Internet under “normal” conditions, as well as under conditions without precedent in its history.

Now, more than ever, the Internet has become a critical lifeline for billions of people around the world impacted by COVID-19. A vast portion of the workforce is working remotely and the Internet has effectively become a digital tether to the world, connecting every one of us to critical services and each other. Despite countries around the world slowly beginning to reopen their economies, many enterprises will continue to support remote workers for the foreseeable future—which means the Internet is increasingly the “x-factor” for employee productivity and business continuity.

While the Internet has come to be regarded as a key facilitator of enterprises’ digital transformation initiatives, the Internet is still a “black box” for many organizations, which puts IT investments into public cloud, SaaS, and SD-WAN at risk, and it makes managing a remote workforce more challenging.

With this report, we hope to provide visibility into the operational and performance signatures that underlie the Internet, both on a global level and regionally, so that IT leaders and practitioners can better understand this “network of networks.”

Key findings from the report include:

• A precipitous rise in network disruptions beginning in March 2020
• Not all outages are created equal—and more disruptions do not indicate systemic performance degradation
• Macro traffic shifts impact Internet-related infrastructures
• Cloud provider networks demonstrate greater resilience than ISP networks
• Regional availability and performance differs across ISP and cloud networks

Enterprise IT teams can draw conclusions from the findings in this study to make informed architecture and digital supply chain decisions.