  The rapid spread of the novel corona virus, SARS-CoV-2, has prompted an
unprecedented response from governments across the world. A third of the world
population have been placed in varying degrees of lockdown, and the Internet
has become the primary medium for conducting most businesses and schooling
activities. This paper aims to provide a multi-prospective account of Internet
performance during the first wave of the pandemic. We investigate the
performance of the Internet control plane and data plane from a number of
globally spread vantage points. We also look closer at two case studies. First,
we look at growth in video traffic during the pandemic, using traffic logs from
a global video conferencing provider. Second, we leverage a country-wide
deployment of measurement probes to assess the performance of mobile networks
during the outbreak. We find that the lockdown has visibly impacted almost all
aspects of Internet performance. Access networks have experienced an increase
in peak and off-peak end to end latency. Mobile networks exhibit significant
changes in download speed, while certain types of video traffic has increased
by an order of magnitude. Despite these changes, the Internet seems to have
coped reasonably well with the lockdown traffic.
