For the past 10 years, Downdetector® has provided critical insights on real-time status and outage information for all kinds of services. We’ve seen huge, widespread outages over the years and 2022 was no exception. While no outage in 2022 eclipsed the biggest outage we’ve ever seen, which Meta experienced on October 4, 2021 when Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram all went down, 2022 still saw some big worldwide outages. We put together a list of the 10 biggest global outages of 2022, so read on to learn how outages affected users:
10. TikTok, September 15, 2022
U.S. TikTok users looking to find the latest dance crazes on TikTok awoke early in the morning on September 15 to some tough news: TikTok was down globally. Nearly 300,000 users flocked to Downdetector to report issues with accessing the website, but luckily the issue seemed to be resolved in a few hours.
9. Snapchat, July 12, 2022
Snapchat users looking to send friends some photo updates were in for a rude reality on July 12, when they experienced a nearly four-hour service issue. While users couldn’t send pictures of themselves with Snapchat’s newest filters, they did record over 300,000 reports on Downdetector.
8. Reddit, April 3, 2022
Reddit users flocking to the website to post their newest r/speedtest results found out they wouldn’t be able to brag about how fast their speeds were on April 3, with Reddit having major issues for roughly two hours. Downdetector recorded over 300,000 user reports during this period to land on our top 10 biggest outages list. Unlucky users had to sit with themselves during this outage and ponder, “AITA?”
7. Call of Duty, August 16, 2022
Gamers in Europe hoping to unwind their day with some Call of Duty rounds tried to log in without any luck for roughly four hours. During this issue, frustrated users around the world recorded over 350,000 issues with the game while they waited for the service to come back online.
6. Twitter, July 14, 2022
Global Twitter users saw a huge service disruption on July 14, 2022, with over 500,000 users recording issues on Downdetector. Users couldn’t load tweets, scroll through the latest news, or let Speedtest® know what download speeds they were experiencing for roughly an hour before services got back up and running.
5. Instagram, July 14, 2022
July 14, 2022 was a busy day for social media companies. A few hours after the Twitter outage, Instagram went down for people around the globe, with users recording nearly 600,000 issues over three hours. During the disruption, users couldn’t access the service or scroll through influencer’s photos or slide into any DMs.
4. Roblox, May 4, 2022
Global Roblox users had a rough day on May 4, 2022. Around midnight UTC, Roblox, which is one of the most popular multiplayer games in the world, saw a massive spike in players’ ability to access the game. That issue seemed to linger for some users for many hours, with users recording over 700,000 reports on Downdetector over the course of the incident.
3. Discord, March 8, 2022
March 8 marked a giant worldwide outage for both Discord and Spotify going down around the same time. While the outage only lasted about two hours, Discord users logged over 1.1 million reports on Downdetector while they waited patiently for the messaging service to come back online. During that period, folks had to resort to voice calls to catch up.
2. WhatsApp, October 25, 2022
Meta-owned WhatsApp is one of the most important global messaging services friends, families, and businesses use to keep in touch and connect to the world. But on October 25, WhatsApp’s 2 billion users found they were incommunicado and could not send any messages. Lasting for roughly two hours, the WhatsApp outage notched nearly 2.9 million issue reports on Downdetector, placing it as runner-up on our list for Downdetector’s biggest outage of the year.
1. Spotify, March 8, 2022
Competition for the largest worldwide outage was extremely tight this year, with Spotify edging out Meta-owned WhatsApp by about 20,000 reports on Downdetector at just over 2.9 million reports. As previously mentioned, March 8 was a big day of downed services. Spotify, the popular music streaming portal, had the biggest outage of the year that day, with users unable to stream their favorite music and podcasts for nearly two hours.
Honorable mention: “It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me”
Notably, but not on this list of biggest outages, Taylor Swift broke the internet a couple of times with the launch of her new album, Midnights. She first disrupted services on Spotify with the October 21 midnight launch of her album for a very brief moment. And then later in the year, to many fans’ frustration and anger, Ticketmaster became inaccessible on November 15 to would-be concert goers who sadly missed out on affordable tickets to her upcoming tour.
Another year, another Downdetector top 10 outages list
Downdetector will continue to leverage over 25 million monthly reports from individual users, real-time analysis, and verification of outage reports, and make sure you have reliable information about the status of services that are important to you. We’ll continue monitoring the world’s largest service disruptions, and be back this time next year with 2023’s largest outages.
Until then, if you want to keep up to date on the latest outages or want quick updates on what’s going on in your country, download the Speedtest app (which has Downdetector integration) for iOS or Android.
To learn more about the data behind this article and what Ookla has to offer, visit https://www.ookla.com/.
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