  During the 2020 pandemic caused by the COVID-19 virus, many countries
implemented stay-at-home measures, which led to many businesses and schools
moving from in-person to online mode of operation. We analyze sampled Netflow
records at a medium-sized US Regional Optical Network to quantify the changes
in the network traffic due to stay-at-home measures in that region. We find
that human-driven traffic in the network decreases to around 70%, and mostly
shifts to local ISPs, while VPN and online meeting traffic increases up to 5
times. We also find that networks adopt a variety of online meeting solutions
and favor one but continue using a few others. We find that educational and
government institutions experience large traffic changes, but aim to keep their
productivity via increased online meetings. Some scientific traffic also
reduces possibly leading to loss of research productivity. Businesses mostly
lose their traffic and few show VPN or online meeting activity. Most network
prefixes experience large loss of live addresses but a handful increase their
liveness. We also find increased incidence of network attacks. Our findings can
help plan network provisioning and management to prepare for future possible
infection outbreaks and natural disasters.
