What Causes Internet Outages/Downtime?

Everyone has experienced at least one Internet outage. Some outages are only a few minutes, and others last days at a time. However, your business relies on the Internet for daily operations, whether that’s communicating via email or VoIP phones, using your point of sales system to service customers and track inventory, or using any other cloud application or cloud server. Even a few minutes offline can be costly. So what are common causes of Internet outages, and how can your business prevent them?

How To Prevent Your Business From Experience Internet Downtime

There are a few things your business can do to help prevent Internet downtime. For the best results, your business should follow all preventative measures listed below:

• Keep on top of your network security – don’t leave your business vulnerable to cyber attacks.
• Monitor your bandwidth and look at increasing it to meet your business needs. In tandem, limit who has access to your Internet and what traffic is allowed to help prevent congestion.
• Make sure to update and upgrade your equipment – ensure that your equipment is performing optimally and upgrade to newer equipment as your old equipment is near its end of life to help prevent hardware failure.
• There are many cases where you can’t prevent Internet outages, such as when a construction crew cuts through a fiber. Stay online by adding backup Internet to your business using a different connectivity method than what you are using for your primary connectivity. Using a different connectivity method helps prevent last-mile outages. Your primary connection is likely a broadband fiber, so you’d ideally want a 4G LTE/5G cellular connectivity for your backup connection.
  
  There are many options out there, so do your research and pick a solution designed for business use cases, such as RocketFailover^® by Akative^®. Also, be wary of the cheap solutions offered on eCommerce sites like Amazon and cellular carrier websites. These solutions are not always complete and are often designed for residential usage with low-grade equipment that can’t handle your business’s network traffic.

6 Internet Downtime Causes

1. Your ISP (Internet Service Provider): Some issues prevent your business from connecting to your ISP. Multiple causes for this interruption include: scheduled updates/upgrades, core outages, failed links, ISP equipment failure, cut fibers, lost power, and more. Depending on the cause and location of the outage, repair time can vary from minutes to days.
2. Congestion: It is possible to overload the network. When you have too many people/too much traffic trying to access the Internet simultaneously, you can cause the Internet connection to become very slow or even crash. This outage is most common on public WiFi networks that don’t have enough bandwidth to support the number of users accessing it.
3. Technology/Hardware Failure: If your router or switch crashes, your business will be without the Internet. Be conscious that not all hardware/devices are created equally, and all have an end of life. Don’t cut corners on your hardware, and plan for replacements accordingly.
4. Human Error: Mistakes happen. Mistakes affecting connectivity include misconfiguration, poor deployment, and trying to access things incorrectly.
5. Cyber attacks: DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks are the most common cyber attack that causes Internet outages. This attack is designed to be a non-intrusive way to take down websites or slow down networks by flooding the network, server, or application with fake traffic and creating congestion.
6. Natural disasters: Sometimes mother nature believes you should unplug for a while.