What this site is, how it is organized, and who built it
Internet Outage Atlas is a broadsheet-style record of landmark internet failures. It treats outages as infrastructure events with patterns, causes, and blast radius that can be documented and compared over time.
This is not a live dashboard and not a status page for one company. It is a reference work. The site follows the shared layers that let failures spread, including naming, routing, edge networks, identity, control planes, and the physical systems underneath them.
The project was researched, written, designed, and built by Jonathan R Reed.
An incident belongs here if it produced meaningful U.S. user impact, revealed a failure mode worth tracking, or clarified how shared infrastructure actually breaks. Meaningful means more than a short wobble and more than one service feeling it.
Minor degradations stay out. So do incidents that can only be verified through social posts or cases where the sourcing is too thin to trust the key facts.
When authoritative sources conflict, this atlas uses the most conservative figure and notes the dispute. Financial loss numbers are used as scale markers, not as precise accounting.