Cisco has decided the world needs its take on an outage map.

The networking giant is unsurprisingly informing its map, which you can find [1]here , with data drawn from implementations of its ThousandEyes observability suite. Switchzilla and its customers run ThousandEyes in over 20,000 data centres and Cisco has accumulated the intelligence those implementations gather to produce its outages map.

Cisco reckons this is a gift to the world that, by using its telemetry, offers information that's closer to the source than rival services like Downdetector, which uses a mix of human and open-source intelligence.

[2]

However, the pre-release version of the site that The Register saw is not very helpful – offering entries such as a dot located in what looks like northern California that was yesterday experiencing 172 outages, including 116 Cloudflare IP addresses from a certain block experiencing issues.

[3]Cisco warns 'unintentional debugging credential' left in some network switches can be abused to hijack equipment

[4]Cisco requires COVID-19 shots for all US staff – even remote workers

[5]Cisco deprecates Microsoft management integrations for UCS servers

[6]Cisco to face trial over trade secrets theft, NDA breach claims after losing attempt to swat Leadfactors lawsuit

As it happens The Register has a decent idea what was wrong – our operatives in San Francisco were among many who suffered an internet outage that hit the whole Bay Area, probably caused by lightning. Cisco's map offered no insights on that situation. Social media did.

I survived the 2021 Bay Area internet outage — stephen (@wthstephen) [7]November 9, 2021

Cisco's site is adorned with promos galore for ThousandEyes, a commercial experience The Register knows many readers may find irritating.

But the commercial experience is kind of the point of the new service, because Cisco has also piped outage info into ThousandEyes for customers so they can understand if their organisation's carriers, SaaS suppliers, or other providers are experiencing unplanned downtime. That info is presented alongside information on the state customers' own systems and apps, so that they can understand the source of any broken dependencies. ®

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[1] https://www.thousandeyes.com/outages/

[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YYqpSE10dQ87xLoCixnDAwAAAIY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0

[3] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/05/cisco_unintentional_debugging_credential_security_alert/

[4] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/03/cisco_updates_covid_19_vaccination_policy/

[5] https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/27/ucs_intergration_deprecatoin/

[6] https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/26/cisco_theft_leadfactors/

[7] https://twitter.com/wthstephen/status/1457965136623267844?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

[8] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/