A system and method for detecting a transient outage of an Internet Protocol (IP) network. A probe sending device sends probe packets over the IP network. A probe packet includes a probe sequence number and a timestamp value issued by the probe sending device. A probe receiving device receives a current probe packet. The probe receiving device overwrites probe packet data obtained from a last received probe packet with the current probe packet when the current probe sequence number exceeds the sequence number of the last received probe packet by one. The probe receiving device stores the current probe packet data obtained from the current probe packet when the current probe sequence number exceeds the sequence number of the last received probe packet by more than one.