All quiet on the internet front?

With the proliferation and increasing dependence of many services and applications on the Internet, this network has become a vital societal asset. This creates the need to protect this critical infrastructure, and over the past years a variety of resilience schemes have been proposed. The effectiveness of protection schemes, however, highly depends on the causes and circumstances of Internet failures, but a detailed comprehensive study of this is not yet available to date. This article provides a high-level summary of an evaluation of Internet failures over the past six years, and presents a number of recommendations for future network resilience research.