The Outage Spike
According to recent reports, global network outages increased 178% from November to December 2025. The United States saw an even more dramatic 284% increase, with outages rising from 153 in November to 587 in December. This trend has continued into early 2026, affecting both residential and business internet users.
What Caused the Surge
Several factors contributed: increased holiday traffic overwhelming ISP infrastructure, severe winter weather damaging physical network infrastructure, growing complexity of cloud and CDN dependencies creating cascading failures, and a notable increase in DDoS attacks targeting ISP infrastructure during the holiday shopping season.
How to Prepare Your Home Network
While you can't prevent ISP outages, you can minimize their impact. Consider a 4G/5G mobile hotspot as a backup connection for critical needs. A UPS (battery backup) for your modem and router keeps your network running during brief power outages. And make sure important files are synced to cloud storage so you can access them from your phone if your home internet goes down.
Business Continuity
For small offices, a secondary internet connection from a different ISP with automatic failover is increasingly important. SD-WAN solutions can manage multiple connections seamlessly, and many business routers now support dual-WAN configurations out of the box.