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.