It's no secret that Internet outages can be frustrating and disruptive, especially when they affect popular platforms and web hosting providers that many people rely on in their daily lives.
While Spotify Wrapped and Apple Music Replay may provide us with a look back at our listening habits, outage tracker Downdetector has also given its data of the biggest Internet outages of 2022.
From the major Spotify outage in March to the widespread impact of the WhatsApp incident in October, these outages affected millions of users and disrupted their access to essential online services.
Biggest Internet outages 2022
The biggest outage may have had an effect on the aforementioned Spotify Wrapped, because users of the popular music streaming platform were unable to access content for up to two hours back in March 2022.
But despite affecting slightly over 2.9 million users, the incident comes nowhere near 2021’s largest outage, when more than 10.6 million Meta users were left without access after an issue in October 2021.
In second place in 2022, just 0.02 million behind Spotify, was indeed that memorable WhatsApp moment, though this was several months later in October.
Third place was awarded to Discord in March 2022 (1.1 million users), with fourth and fifth taken by Roblox (May 2022, 700,000 users) and Instagram (July 2022, 600,000 users).
Rounding out the top ten were: Twitter (July 2022, 500,000 users); Call of Duty (August 2022, 350,000 users); Reddit (April 2022, 300,000 users); Snapchat (July 2022, 300,000 users); and the sensation that is TikTok (September 2022, 300,000 users).
Perhaps most notable among the 2022 results were the issues affecting social media platforms, which made up 70% of the largest outages. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram - three of the most popular social media sites according to Statcounter, accounting for more than 88.5% of all accounts - were all affected.
While the outages varied in terms of the number of affected users and the duration of the disruption, they all served as a reminder of the importance of maintaining a stable and reliable connection to the Internet.
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