Extent of Impact of Verizon Outages Revealed in Cloudflare Report

Cloudflare has released details on the extent of the recent Verizon outage that affected millions of telecom users in the US.

On September 30, Verizon customers across the country began experiencing connectivity issues. Users reported that their devices were stuck in SOS mode during the outage. Data from Downdetector at the time showed a massive increase in reports across the country, with customers unable to make or receive calls from mobile devices.

While the issue has since been fixed by Verizon, an analysis by Cloudflare has now highlighted the significant impact it had on connectivity across the US.

Verizon outage

In a blog post detailing the outage, David Belson, Head of Data Insight at Cloudflare, analyzed data from AS6167 (CELLCO), an autonomous system that Cloudflare uses to manage its cellular network.

Using this data, Cloudflare was able to track HTTP requests from the autonomous system and provide insight into the extent of connectivity issues affecting individual cities and regions.

“To better understand how the outage impacted Internet traffic on Verizon's network, we took a look at AS6167's HTTP request volume regardless of geography, as well as AS6167's traffic in various cities, according to reports were most affected,” Belson wrote .

Notably, Cloudflare had not seen a “noticeable change” in request volume as of 9 a.m. ET, around the time Verizon first reported the issue 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 another 9% drop over the following three hours.

This reduced request volume continued for several hours until Verizon confirmed at 5 p.m

Verizon confirmed that engineers were working on a solution and that services would be restored for 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.

“In cities such as Los Angeles, Seattle, Omaha, Denver, Phoenix, Minneapolis, Indianapolis, and Chicago, declines in request traffic are clearly visible starting around 11:00 a.m. ET (15:00 UTC),” Belson wrote.

“Omaha saw the largest difference in traffic volumes, down about 30%, while other cities saw declines in the 10% to 20% range.”

Which services were affected and what caused the Verizon outage?

According to Cloudflare, the majority of users experienced acute issues with voice services, which Belson said “may have been more impacted” than data services during the incident.

“We saw some declines in request traffic in the affected cities, but none experienced complete outages,” he noted.

The exact cause of the outage has yet to be determined, and at the time of Cloudflare's analysis, there was no specific information on the root cause of the incident.

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