How Downdetector tracks network outages during natural disastersHow Downdetector tracks network outages during natural disasters

Hurricanes hit the East Coast of the US particularly hard this year and caused extensive damage to telecommunications networks. In North Carolina, nearly 80% of cell sites in the disaster area were out of service on September 28 after Hurricane Helene hit, and about 40% were out of service for the affected areas in Tennessee.

Downdetector, a service by Ookla that tracks network outages, was a resource the telecom industry and consumers turned to to keep up with network disruptions during hurricane season.

"Downdetector is our near real-time application that … provides consumers with a view into, 'Is there something going on near me or if I am experiencing an issue, what type of issue and I experiencing with a particular operator?'," Chip Strange, Chief Strategy Officer for Ookla, tells Light Reading. "This isn't just about last mile connectivity, it's about the broader Internet itself."

'What's really going on'

Strange joins the podcast to provide a postmortem analysis of the impact of hurricanes Helene and Milton on the East Coast networks. He explains how Downdetector keeps the market informed of both telecommunications and power outages, and how the site analyzes different types of service disruptions. He also shares how many reports of outages came in for each of the three major mobile carriers: Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile.

During Hurricane Helene, for example, "in the Asheville area, the number of reports on Downdetector were up ten times the average of the previous four weeks," says Strange, adding that "there were a lot of people interacting and trying to understand what was going on with their telecommunications and power infrastructure."

Downdetector helps consumers drill down into "what's really going on" in the network and insights into the cause of outages, he says.