...
In January 2020 there were two cable cuts along the west coast of Africa that affected sites in Southern Africa, see: South Africa damage to the SAT-3 and WACS undersea cable Jan 16 2020. In this case there was no 100% packet loss since the routes automatically switched to alternate-working routes, however, there was a significant step-change in the minimum RTT.
Another example is the impact of the Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami March 11th, 2011. Again there was a significant step-change in the RTTs from SLAC to many Japanese hosts and new routes were chosen to avoid damaged cables to the US.
Also see see:
- Effects of Mediterranean Fibre Cuts December 2008 and Effects of Fibre Outage through Mediterranean Jan 31st, 2008
...
Political events
There were several political events in 2018-2019 reported in the Financial Times, that impacted Internet performance, see Internet performance and political decisions 2019.
Other examples are: