Abstract
Shelter in place and lockdown orders during the COVID-19 pandemic affected a number of public and private services. In this paper, we study the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on communication network outages in the United States. We use four publicly available data sources (FCC Outage Data, FCC complaints, Google Trends & Twitter) to study the frequency of network outages in the United States at the onset of the pandemic. Our analysis indicates an increase in network outages occurred during the immediate lockdown period in March 2020, and that the elevated rate of outages persisted for months, with effects continuing to be seen in Q4 of 2020.