Identifying major Internet traffic disruptions

There are a few websites online that you can use to find out how the overall health of the Internet at anytime is. These websites monitor and record how the flow of traffic going in and out of different regions and countries are faring.

1. Internet Traffic Report (internettrafficreport.com) – shows you different parts of the world are doing with regards to response time and packet loss. The Internet Traffic Report site shows a “Current Index” this shows how everything is going. The higher the number of the index value the better the health of the Internet in that continent. If you click on each continent it will show the different routers being monitored, their index value, the response time from the router, and any packet loss.

2. Internet Health Report (internethealthreport.com) – shows select major North American Internet service providers and how they are doing when exchanging traffic between each other. Providers listed include AT&T, CenturyLink, Cogent, Level3, Savvis, SBC (now part of AT&T), Sprint, Verizon, and XO. Internet Health Report shows network availability, latency, and packet loss. You can go back and look at the numbers for the previous hour, 4 hours ago, or 24 hours ago. At this moment on Internet Health Report you can see there is increase latency and packet loss between AT&T and Level3. Cogent and Level3 are also experiencing some increased latency and packet loss. The same with XO and Level3. Connections between Verizon and Sprint are also experiencing increased latency and packet loss.

3. Real-Time Internet Monitor by Akamai (akami.com) – This web page on the Akamai website shows you where in the world there are attacks going on. Cities with the slowest Internet (increased latency) and the maps also show where there is the most web traffic.