Internet Outage Detection and Analysis

Public and private sector stakeholders around the world seek ways to ensure that the Internet provides the level of reliability and resilience we have long taken for granted from the telephony network. Unfortunately, in spite of the societal and economic impact of Internet connectivity disruptions, there is a lack of near-realtime, scalable, and validated methodologies and tools to identify and understand large-scale Internet outages. By combining measurements at the control plane, active probing, and passive traffic analysis, the IODA research group has developed an operational prototype system that monitors the Internet, in near-realtime, with the goal of identifying macroscopic Internet outages affecting the edge of the network, i.e., significantly impacting an autonomous system or a large fraction of a country.

OTF's first phase of support for IODA allowed for improved the methods and accuracy in detecting outages, the creation of documentation and new features for users, public reports about Internet outages in Gabon and Benin, and engagement with advocates and researcher. OTF's second phase of support will continue efforts to make the platform more useful and accessible to non-technical users through both improvements to the interface and by increasing the accuracy and breadth of detection, while also releasing timely reports on outages detected and increasing collaboration with others working to oppose network shutdowns, such as network interference researchers.