Abstract
Power outages are a well-known threat to Internet communications systems. While Internet service providers address this threat via backup power systems in datacenters and points-of-presence, office buildings and private homes may not have similar capabilities.
This chapter describes an empirical study that assesses how power outages in the United States impact end-host access to the Internet. To conduct this study, the PowerPing system was created to monitor a power outage reporting website and measure end-host responsiveness in the impacted areas. PowerPing collected power outage and end-host responsiveness data over 14 months from June 2020 through July 2021.
The results reveal that power outages affecting 10% or more customers in U.S. counties occur at a rate of about 50 events/day. The outages typically impact about 3,000 customers and services are restored in just under two hours. The end-host responsiveness characteristics for typical power outage events are also reported. Surprisingly, only a weak correlation exists between power outage impacts and service restoration periods versus end-host responsiveness. This suggests that improving backup power for network devices in office buildings and private homes may enable end-hosts to maintain access to Internet service during typical power outages.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant nos. CNS 1703592 and CNS 2039146. The authors also wish to thank the operators of CloudLab for their support in this research.
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Anderson, S., Bell, T., Egan, P., Weinshenker, N., Barford, P. (2024). Measuring the Impacts of Power Outages on Internet Hosts in the United States. In: Staggs, J., Shenoi, S. (eds) Critical Infrastructure Protection XVII. ICCIP 2023. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 686. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49585-4_4
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