Cloudflare details Verizon outage's impact on internet traffic

With no current statement from Verizon on the cause of the outage and the Federal Communications Commission has launched an investigation, Cloudflare has released a blog post detailing information on Verizon's internet traffic during the downtime.  Although the information doesn't offer much insight into why the outage happened, it gives insight into the impact. According to Cloudflare, AS6167 (CELLCO) is Verizon's autonomous system for its mobile network. An autonomous system or AS, is a very large network or group of networks assigned a unique ASN used to identify the AS. Given this information, Cloudflare was able to track HTTP requests made by AS6167, beginning with a broad analysis and then for cities suspected of being impacted more severely. 

At 09:00 ET, Cloudflare did not notice any significant changes for the network as a whole despite Verizon having released a statement on social media stating the network was experiencing issues. However, around 11:00 ET, Cloudflare Radar reported a five percent decrease in HTTP requests, which sank even lower to around nine percent over the next three hours. After Verizon released a statement that engineers were making progress on the issue, HTTP requests returned to normal and exceeded last week's number of requests around the same time, 17:15 ET. The network continued to recover, coinciding with Verizon's statements on the resolved network issue. 

Unfortunately, this was not the case for the entire network. Omaha, Denver, Chicago, Phoenix, and others faced more severe outages, with HTTP requests dipping 10-20 percent during the same time frame. Omaha, Nebraska, was impacted the most, with requests around 30 percent lower than the same time last week. However, Cloudflare mentions that traffic in Omaha was already trending low this week, which could account for lower traffic. For cities New York and Atlanta, Cloudflare noticed minimal changes to requests, with traffic trending slightly higher, despite these cities having been reported to be experiencing issues. 

Based on the analysis, Cloudflare suspects that Verizon's network issues mainly affected the network's voice services and not the data services. Fortunately, the data also shows that despite having affected multiple cities, no city experienced a full outage. For more information, please visit the blog post below.