In 2025, digital services proved both indispensable and fragile. This year’s largest outages were defined by platform-level disruptions, particularly across video, gaming, and communication platforms, that impacted millions of users. However, given how many individual platforms rely on the same few cloud providers and core systems, the role of centralized infrastructure also played a key role, demonstrating how a single point of failure can still cause disruption to cascade across multiple services simultaneously.

We used Downdetector® data from 2025 to analyze millions of user reports and identify the largest website and service outages of the year.

The World’s Biggest Outages of 2025

2025 saw a combination of major outages across gaming, streaming, and social media services, but none were more impactful than the cloud services outages that affected companies across the globe. These large-scale incidents underscored how failures in core infrastructure can ripple outward to millions of users. Here is a look at the largest global outages of 2025, according to Downdetector data.

• AWS (Oct 20, 2025): The largest global incident of 2025 was the result of an AWS outage that received over 17 million Downdetector reports across Amazon and all other impacted services. This outage lasted over 15 hours and was traced to an issue with the automated DNS management system for DynamoDB in the US-EAST-1 region. This single point of failure caused widespread disruption across dependent platforms like Snapchat, Netflix, and various e-commerce sites.
• PlayStation Network (Feb 7, 2025): The second largest global outage stemmed from the gaming sector, with over 3.9 million reports to the PlayStation Network Downdetector page. This network-wide disruption affected users for over 24 hours, locking out players from major titles like Call of Duty and Fortnite. Downdetector’s Incident Attribution analysis concluded the cause was internal to PSN, with no major cloud or ISP involvement.
• Cloudflare (Nov 18, 2025): The world’s third-largest outage, registering over 3.3 million reports across all impacted services, was due to a global disruption within the core cloud infrastructure that lasted for nearly five hours. This massive incident affected countless websites, applications, and APIs that rely on Cloudflare’s services. The sheer scale and duration of user-reported issues highlighted the global dependence on centralized cloud infrastructure.

Biggest Outages in Each Region

Note: Global outage data is based on total reports across all impacted services while regional outage data is based on data for individual services.

United States and Canada

United States and Canada experienced the highest concentration of high-impact outages, with the top three all surpassing over 1 million reports.

• PlayStation Network (Feb 7, 2025): Topped the chart with 1.6 million reports.
• YouTube (Oct 15, 2025): Recorded 1.5 million reports during its global streaming issue.
• AWS (Oct 20, 2025): The cloud outage drove 1.2 million reports to the status page.
• Snapchat (Oct 20, 2025): With 944,675 reports, the social media app was a major casualty of the AWS incident.
• Starlink (Jul 24, 2025): The satellite internet service saw a significant spike with 583,989 reports.
• Verizon (Aug 30, 2025): A major telecommunications disruption at Verizon registered 515,923 reports, highlighting the continued vulnerability of connectivity services.

Europe (EU)

Europe’s outages were a mix of gaming, social, and major telecommunications disruptions.

• PlayStation Network (Feb 7, 2025): The gaming platform’s global issue topped the EU list with 1.7 million reports.
• Snapchat (Oct 20, 2025): This social media service saw the second-highest outage activity in the region with 989,559 reports submitted by users.
• Vodafone (Oct 13, 2025): A UK-wide internet outage for this major telecommunications company generated 833,211 reports. The problem, attributed to a non-malicious software issue with a vendor partner, affected broadband, 4G, and 5G services.
• WhatsApp (Feb 28, 2025): The messaging platform caused significant disruption for its users with 621,763 reports.
• Spotify (Apr 16, 2025): The music streaming service’s outage recorded 468,334 reports, making it a major non-video streaming event.
• Odido (June 15 + June 25, 2025): Within 10 days, the Netherlands telecommunications provider experienced two separate outages that totaled 357,685 reports (June 15th) and 382,003 reports (June 25th).

Asia Pacific (APAC)

Social media and cloud services dominated the largest outages in the Asia Pacific region.

• X (Twitter) (Mar 10, 2025): X topped the list with 645,395 reports, demonstrating the service’s critical role in the region.
• Snapchat (Oct 20, 2025): The social media app had the second-largest outage, with 399,108 reports.
• YouTube (Oct 15, 2025): The global streaming issue that hit YouTube was felt acutely in the APAC region, registering 245,087 reports.
• AWS (Oct 20, 2025): The cloud service failure drove 175,380 reports, with another AWS-related incident on April 15 adding 106,667 reports.

Latin America (LATAM)

Latin America’s largest outages featured global streaming and cloud failures, alongside significant regional financial and telecom disruptions.

• YouTube (Oct 15, 2025): The streaming platform’s outage in October led the region with 183,672 reports.
• AWS (Oct 20, 2025): The cloud services outage was the second largest in the region, recording 164,011 reports.
• WhatsApp (Feb 28, 2025): The messaging platform saw 87,265 reports during a disruption in late February and then just two months later it experienced another outage that generated 57,095 reports.
• Banco Itaú (Oct 6, 2025): This major banking platform’s outage registered 73,745 reports, highlighting a serious disruption in the banking and finance vertical.

Middle East and Africa (MEA)

The largest outages in the Middle East and Africa featured significant disruptions from key regional telecommunications providers alongside major global cloud and social media services.

• Du (Feb 8, 2025): This telecommunications provider experienced a major disruption in February, recording 28,444 reports.
• Cloudflare (Nov 18, 2025): The cloud service provider saw 28,016 reports in MEA during the global outage.
• Snapchat (Oct 20, 2025): The social media platform registered 26,392 reports during a service disruption in October.

Conclusion

Downdetector is your source for information about service disruptions, monitoring real-time performance for thousands of popular web services globally. Businesses looking for early alerting on service issues, deeper competitive intelligence, and the ability to correlate an issue to an upstream or downstream provider may find Downdetector Explorer™, the enterprise version of Downdetector, a key resource.

Airline websites saw fifty times the average number of user reports on July 19, with Delta Airlines and Ryanair (a low-cost airline in Europe), having the largest number of reports in this sector, according to Downdetector.com. 

A routine software update performed by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike on July 19 caused what some believe to be the largest tech outage in IT history. Microsoft reported that the outage impacted around 8.5 million Microsoft Windows devices causing the devices to display the blue screen of death.

The outage resulted in major airlines being forced to ground their flights, TV news stations going off the air, hospitals canceling medical procedures, and banks being unable to transfer customers’ funds. 

Downdetector by Ookla, which monitors real-time performance for thousands of popular web services globally, had a front row seat to the July 19 outage. Nearly 5 million reports were made to Downdetector.com on the status of different websites, which was more than three times the average number of users that typically visit the Downdetector site every day. 

All major sectors of the economy see spike in outage reports

Downdetector reported surges in outage reports across a variety of sectors, from emergency services, which saw the largest increase over its daily average, at 68x, to airlines, retail, banking, and even dating services.

Not surprisingly, Microsoft bore the brunt of user reported outages. Microsoft witnessed a 42x increase over its daily average, while Microsoft 365, its cloud-based productivity suite, saw user reports increase 18x. Microsoft Azure was also impacted, with user reported outages up 21x.

Beyond software providers, transport, airlines, ride sharing and even e-commerce and delivery services saw large spikes in outage reports. Tesla saw an increase of 12x over its daily average, while user reported outages for Uber were up 57x, and Uber Eats experienced a 41x increase. Amazon witnessed a 14x increase in outage reports, while DHL and Fedex saw 6x and 4x increases respectively.

Airline sites hit with 50% rise in reports 

As was widely reported in the news, the airline industry was significantly impacted by the Crowdstrike-induced outage. OAG, a provider of digital flight information, reported that the world’s 20 largest airlines canceled nearly 10,000 flights between July 19 and July 21.

Delta Airlines was by far the most impacted of the large global airlines, having canceled 5,300 flights since the outage started. The airline is now under federal investigation for how it’s handling the delays and cancellations. 

Not surprisingly, Downdetector’s data on the various airline websites shows that the airline category of websites experienced more than 50 times the average number of user reports on July 19, with Delta Airlines and Ryanair (a low-cost airline covering Europe), leading this sector. In fact, Delta alone experienced a 92x increase in user reports on July 19 compared to its typical daily average and United Airlines saw a 57x increase. Delta was still experiencing more than 6x the average daily number of user reports four days after the outage on July 23. 

Digital banks and financial companies also struggled to serve their customers during the outage. Visa received more than 64,000 user reports on July 19 compared to its typical daily average of just 1,500 and online bank TDBank also saw its user reports increase to more than 56,000 on the 19th compared to its typical daily average of 240 reports. 

Although most company websites have rebounded from the Crowdstrike debacle, the outage showcased just how vulnerable today’s websites are to software glitches and updates and how important tools like Downdetector.com are to providing real-time analysis. 

Downdetector.com leverages more than 25 million monthly reports from individual users to make sure you have reliable information about the status of services that are important to you. For more, please read this blog post.

Editor’s Note: This article was updated August 6 from 5 million users to 5 million reports to better reflect how Downdetector tracks the number of outage reports submitted.

When you want to check your internet performance, you take a Speedtest®. If you can’t connect to a site, you check Downdetector®. Now, we’ve added a new Downdetector tab in the Speedtest app so you can do both in one location. This combines the internet’s most trusted app for testing connectivity with Downdetector’s real-time status information for over 12,000 apps, websites, and services across in 47 countries — with one tap. Using these free utilities, you can now diagnose whether your connection is in trouble or if there’s a larger service issue all in one place.

This is the same methodology we use for the Downdetector site you’ve come to trust. It’s simply in a more convenient location.

Check for online outages

Tap the “Status” tab at the bottom center of the Speedtest app to see a snapshot of the current status of the apps, websites, and services Downdetector monitors, tailored to show what’s most relevant in your country. Sites and services that are experiencing problems will appear at the top, giving you a quick view of whether the problem you’re experiencing is more widespread. Read more about how a few critical services can take down chunks of the internet here.

Check for details on a specific incident

Tap any site or service on the status page for a more detailed view of what’s going on. You’ll see a graph of incident reports over the last 24 hours as well as a chart of what types of issues users have reported. You can also tap on the blue button at the bottom of the page to submit your own report to Downdetector including information about your experience. This helps other users understand what they might also be experiencing.

Coming soon

This update is currently rolling out to Android and iOS devices worldwide. Update your Speedtest app if you don’t see the Downdetector tab. Soon we’ll also be adding in the ability to search for a specific site or service. Keep an eye out for this and other improvements as you troubleshoot your internet connectivity in the Speedtest app.

Download the Speedtest app for Android or iOS today to check out this new feature and let us know what you think on Twitter or Facebook.