Internet Outages, the Eyewitness Accounts: Analysis of the Outages Mailing List

Abstract

Understanding network reliability and outages is critical to the “health” of the Internet infrastructure. Unfortunately, our ability to analyze Internet outages has been hampered by the lack of access to public information from key players. In this paper, we leverage a somewhat unconventional dataset to analyze Internet reliability—the outages mailing list. The mailing list is an avenue for network operators to share information and insights about widespread outages. Using this unique dataset, we perform a first-of-its-kind longitudinal analysis of Internet outages from 2006 to 2013 using text mining and natural language processing techniques. We observe several interesting aspects of Internet outages: a large number of application and mobility issues that impact users, a rise in content, mobile issues, and discussion of large-scale DDoS attacks in recent years.