Jeff Collins: Companies Blindly Suffer as Internet Outages Surge

When a major outage hits today, figuring out where it started is often more challenging than fixing it. A recent routing issue tied to a Cloudflare BGP misconfiguration, for example, did not just disrupt one service. It cascaded across multiple providers at once. Teams inside affected companies could see the impact in real time, but many could not answer a basic question. Was the failure inside their own environment or somewhere else along the network path?

That uncertainty is becoming the norm. Outages no longer stay contained. They stretch across ISPs, cloud platforms, and edge services at the same time. What should be a technical response has turned into a process of elimination. Teams burn critical hours trying to locate a problem without a direct line of sight.

The illusion of control

Enterprises have built deep visibility into what they own. They monitor applications, track performance, and instrument infrastructure down to the smallest detail. But modern systems no longer live inside a single environment. Every application now depends on a chain of external services.

Cloud providers, content distribution networks (CDNs), DNS platforms, and transit networks all sit between a user and an application. Data moves across this chain in ways that are dynamic and often unpredictable. Today, more than 95 percent of enterprise organizations have a cloud footprint, reflecting how deeply application delivery now depends on infrastructure outside any single company’s control. Yet, most monitoring strategies still stop at the edge of the network. Beyond that point, organizations are left inferring what might be happening rather than observing it directly.

The hours lost to uncertainty

When something breaks, teams fall into a familiar loop. They check internal systems first. Everything looks fine. They escalate to cloud providers, who find no clear issue. Then they reach out to network partners and still receive no definitive answer. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking. The disruption itself is often brief. The investigation is what lingers.

The gap becomes most visible at the edges of modern infrastructure. A regional telecom slowdown disrupts mobile users across a specific geography, yet core network dashboards remain fully green. Hours later, the root cause surfaces as a peering issue between carriers, outside the scope of internal monitoring. Hospital systems experience intermittent EHR access during peak hours, triggering concern across clinical teams. The focus is on the application stack, but the issue is eventually traced to DNS resolution failures affecting only certain networks, creating a pattern that is difficult to isolate without external visibility.

Delays like these carry real consequences. Customer trust erodes. Internal teams lose confidence. Business operations slow down. The outage is the visible problem. The inability to trace it is the hidden one.

A network no one fully sees

The root of the issue lies in how little visibility exists into data in motion. Most tools are built to monitor endpoints. They show what is happening on servers, in applications, or within owned infrastructure. They do not show how data travels between those points. And that path matters more than ever.

Routing decisions made across the internet can shift traffic in real time. A single change upstream can send data through entirely different providers or geographies. When that happens, organizations often have no way to detect it directly. They are left piecing together clues from incomplete information. The internet has effectively become a black box. It is trusted by default, but rarely understood in practice.

A new expectation of accountability

The lack of visibility into data in motion does not just create technical challenges. It creates an accountability gap. Regulatory frameworks like GDPR, FedRAMP, and DORA increasingly require organizations to understand not only where data is stored, but how it moves. The legal concept of “mere transit” has eroded as courts and regulators recognize that data passing through a jurisdiction can still be subject to surveillance and interception.

This raises a new standard. Organizations must be able to explain where data traveled, which jurisdictions it crossed, and what risks were introduced along the way. That includes identifying when traffic is routed through high-risk regions, when unauthorized providers are involved, or when routing changes introduce new compliance exposure.

Yet most organizations cannot answer these questions directly. Existing tools provide only partial views, often limited to internal systems or point-in-time traces that lack context. As a result, when something goes wrong, teams are forced into retrospective analysis, reconstructing events from incomplete data and external confirmations.

This is why outages increasingly resemble investigations. Not because systems are more fragile, but because the network they depend on remains largely unseen. And until that visibility gap is addressed, the time required to understand an incident will continue to outlast the incident itself.

Jeff Collins, CEO of WanAware, has over 25 years of experience driving profitable growth by transforming brands, companies, and cultures. In 2020, Collins began developing WanAware after recognizing the need for effective IT Observability solutions due to the limitations of outdated legacy tools and antiquated models. He also holds leadership positions at 21Packets (Chairman) and Lightstream (Chief Strategy Officer), and serves on the boards of multiple technology companies, contributing his expertise in cybersecurity, AI, networking, and data transformation. This Expert Opinion is exclusive to Broadband Breakfast.

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