When a website you are used to accessing and being online suddenly ceases its service, usually there is one place you go to make sure that the problem isn’t just on your end – Downdetector.

Owned by speed tracker Ookla, Downdetector has been the place for netizens to report internet outages the world over, and new data from the company tells of the 10 largest outages in terms of the number of people who reported them until June 2023.

Here are the 10 largest internet outages of the first half of the year in order:

• League of Legends – 13th May 2023

Nearly 200 000 LoL players leapt towards Downdetecter in May to report that their MOBA fix was dead in the waters. Ookla shares that hour by hour for the entire day players noted difficulty accessing the game.

Developer Riot Games did not indicate what the problem was at the time though the outage was quickly resolved.

• Microsoft 365 – 25th January 2023

At the beginning of the year hundreds of thousands of people reported trouble accessing Microsoft 365, software used by enterprises and people at home across the world.

Over 240 000 individual complaints reached Downdetector that the 365 Suite was inaccessible, including Teams, Outlook, OneDrive for Business, Sharepoint Online, Exchange Online, and Microsoft Graph. Reports started early and continued throughout the day, trickling in from all corners of the globe.

The outage was caused by problems on Microsoft’s Azure cloud service which cut network connectivity to 365.

• EA – 4th May 2023

Thousands of gamers were failing to log into their EA accounts and games as of 4th May 2023, and with so many EA games being live service and suffering from always-on DRM, without online service many titles just couldn’t be played including the latest FIFA.

Some EA players were unable to access their accounts throughout the day, says Ookla. In all, over 298 000 gamers reported issues. Like Riot, EA did not indicate what caused the one-day outage.

• YouTube – 9th February 2023

It’s difficult to imagine the internet without its corner club, YouTube but in February thousands awoke, clicked on the red play button on their bookmark tab and were met with a 404.

Throughout the day 300 000 users reported the outage on Downdetecter, with Ookla saying that there was an equal amount of reports from users unable to access both the website and mobile application.

The homepage went down around 2 AM CAT, but was up again in around two hours, as per YouTube on X. No explanation was given.

• Steam – 25th June 2023

Steam, the world’s favourite place to buy games, suffered a major service outage in June this year, with over 308 000 gamers hurrying to report to Downdetector. Most were concerned with server connectivity disruptions and login issues.

Luckily, Steam has an offline mode but with the servers down many of the platform’s best features, like Cloud saves, would become inaccessible. Some users were reporting sync issues because of this. No official word came from Valve for this outage.

• Diablo – 8th June 2023

Just three days after the incredibly successful launch of Diablo IV, the game’s servers suffered an outage leaving over 338 000 Nephilim with nothing to do but look at their Battle.net client and skulk to Downdetector.

Developer Blizzard issued a formal apology for the outage, probably owing to its proximity to launch day. The problem was caused by enormous numbers of people jumping online at the same time, which tested Blizzard’s infrastructure.

The game hasn’t had a similar downage since, but Blizzard is no stranger to server problems. During its launch of Overwatch 2 the company dealt with two DDoS attacks at once.

• Roblox – 28th January 2023

If you have any young family members, be it your own children or nieces and nephews, chances are you have heard of Roblox. The free online-only mobile game is a juggernaut in terms of sheer playerbase.

However, the game suffered an outage in January this year that brought nearly half a million people to Downdetector to report a problem with access.

Over 470 000 reports were submitted on Downdetector on 28th January, of the internet outages in the gaming industry, this was the biggest of 2023 so far, says Ookla in a press release.

The downtime was only for an hour, which makes it even more incredible that so many people went to report it. However it was an intensive issue, affecting almost every aspect of the game, and across all of its platforms from mobile to the Xbox app.

• Spotify – 14th January 2023

With over half a billion people tuning into Spotify every month its no wonder why an outage in January brought over 489 000 users to make a report.

Users lost access to music, podcasts and even audiobooks on the mobile platform, with the outage lasting around two hours, and many users reporting connectivity issues for the rest of the day.

According to Spotify engineers, the issue was caused after scheduled maintenance caused the platform’s internal DNS resolvers, a “critical component in [its] internal DNS infrastructure” to fail.

“Due to the nature of the incident, triage took longer than one would expect; our internal tooling was inaccessible. At 02:00 UTC, the root cause had been identified and mitigation was underway,” the team said. Core services returned to normal after around three hours of downtime.

• Reddit – 14th March 2023

The two largest outages on Ookla’s list are of social media platforms. The first stems from Reddit, with over 1.2 million users around the world angrily heading to Downdetector to report they couldn’t reply to or up/downvote other users.

It seems the outage was widespread, with many users not even able to access the website, according to The Verge. The problem was apparently caused by “an internal systems issue” according to Reddit, and was resolved in a few hours.

• Instagram – 21st May 2023

From January to June 2023, the largest outage in terms of Downdetector reports goes to Meta’s Instagram. Over 2.4 million users worldwide reported issues with the social media giant on the day, making it the largest among the internet outages of 2023 so far.

The firm blamed “a technical issue” for the downtime, according to Reuters. With Meta claiming it resolved the issue as quickly as possible. It seems access problems started slowly disappearing after about five hours of downtime.

Meta suffered a massive 6-hour outage across all of its platforms in 2021, leaving 3.5 billion users worldwide at the time, without access to apps including WhatsApp and Facebook. It was the largest service outage the company has ever seen.

Downdetector continues to be a solid resource, even for South Africans struggling with internet problems. It tracks spikes in outages from local companies as well, like Eskom and Vumatel.

[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]