14 DAY TRIAL // ENISA, the European Network and Information Security Agency, publishes each year a report on the root causes of most Internet and telephony network downtime.
According to its latest report, during 2014, the agency recorded over 137 major incidents, with only 4 European states not being affected by one single incident during the year.
Most problems were encountered in fixed telephony (47%), followed by mobile telephony (39%), mobile Internet (35%), and fixed Internet services (34%). Don't worry if all the percentages don't add up to 100%, that being because some incidents affected more than one service at a time.
The most interesting fact in ENISA's report is that, while you'd expect hackers to bring down these services during their hacktivism campaigns, the situation is quite different when you look at the stats together.
System failures are to blame for most Internet and telephony downtime
According to ENISA, 66% of all recorded downtime was due to a system failure, usually caused by a faulty switch or router (20% of incidents), an underground cable (12%), transmission nodes, or mobile base stations (each 9%).
Following system failures, the second source of downtime was human errors with 20%, followed by malicious actions with only 9%, and natural phenomena with 5%.
Breaking down the source of Internet and telephony downtime even deeper, according to the ENISA report, software bugs are at fault 34% of the time, followed by actual hardware failures in 20% of the cases, cut cables in 16%, power cuts in 13%, and faulty updates and equipment overloads, each with 11%.
The hardest incidents to fix were faulty software updates, which took on average 117 hours to complete, while the easiest ones were changes in faulty hardware, which only took 2 hours to remediate.
The sad side of this report also shows that 29% of all downtime also affected the 112 emergency calls hotline, Europe's equivalent to the US 911 service.
ENISA's full report is available for download.
