Spotify went down for two hours in March
(Picture: Spotify)DownDetector has become the first port of call for internet users scrambling to figure out why their favourite app isn’t working.
The site provides real-time updates on the internet’s biggest platforms, from games like Call of Duty to shopping sites such as Amazon, by parsing through user reports and social media and app data. It then illustrates this info on live outage graphs and maps that indicate where reported problems are occurring. That way you can find out if the issue is widespread, and not just down to your dodgy internet connection.
So, who better to give us a rundown of the biggest tech fails of 2022. This year’s top 10 list of the largest internet outages compiled by DownDetector revealed that our fave services continued to let us down. Heck, it doesn’t matter that these companies are raking in billions of dollars every year, because those riches clearly don’t make them immune to crashes.
Spotify tops the list this year, but not due to people rushing to view its year-end Wrapped playlists. The music streamer suffered an outage for around two hours on March 8 that was reported by 2.9 million DownDetector users. That massive disruption just inched out a WhatsApp crash that took place on October 25, which was 20,000 user reports shy of the top spot.
Sometimes multiple services can go offline on the same day, as was the case for Discord, which also went down worldwide for two hours on March 8, along with Spotify. The chat app’s outage reported by 1.1 million users landed it in third place on the rankings.
This type of interruption can sometimes be caused by problems with internet infrastructure providers that power large parts of the web. For instance, platforms including Disney+, Slack, Twitch and PlayStation Network were affected by an Amazon Web Services outage late last year.
Back to the present, and social gaming service Roblox appeared to have the longest down time, with spikes in user reports lasting throughout the night back in May. While seventh place Call of Duty and ninth place Snapchat dropped out for four hours each in August and July, respectively.
DownDetector even gave a special shout out to Taylor Swift after the pop star’s Midnights album release and tour sales crashed Spotify and Ticketmaster.
Despite issues plaguing the world’s biggest online services, nothing came close to matching the scale of the outage that rattled Meta’s biggest platforms on October 4, 2021. The worldwide crash that affected Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp was reported 14 million times. With Facebook log-ins also used to access other sites, the nature of that crash was more pervasive than anything witnessed this year.
The company, then known as Facebook, said a “faulty configuration change” on its routers was believed to be the cause of the outage.
