Covid-19’s effect on the Internet

Abstract: With the pandemic caused by covid-19, beginning in 2020, resulting in workand education to be conducted from home, which in turn resulted in a dramaticincrease in both download and upload traffic for the Internet. This report sum-marizes the findings of multiple papers which used different methods for datacollection, such as Routeviews and RIPE Atlas. The papers found how differentmetrics were affected, such as the commonly found increases in packet loss and latency. The quality of experience notably decreased in Asia, even long after lockdown restrictions were loosened. Meanwhile, Europe and the United States, despite experiencing decreases in performance during the lockdown period, met-rics were mostly restored post lockdown period. The report also brings forth what potential reasons caused different parts of the world to get affected differently. Within Europe there was a notable difference of how countries got affected depending on if they went straight into a majorl ockdown or if they were successively put under lockdown before the whole country was affected. As for Asia, a potential reason as to why Asian countries fared worse compared to Europe or the United States could be the less developed Internet infrastructure. Moreover, the economic aspect was to a lesser degree looked at, with opinions amongst economic experts differing. It was mostly found that the Internet as a whole held up well considering the sudden increase in userbase, with most problems occurring in the beginning of the pandemic, which were later resolved or close to being back to normal. The more long lasting effects were found in Asia, which could be attributed to a less developed infrastructure in the region as a whole. The digital economy was also affected greatly which was speculated to take up to two years before recovering to its former state.This impact on the economy could lead to the developmentof digital fields  slowing down.