These were the 10 biggest internet outages of 2022 (with one surprising omission)

Downdetector makes it easy to report and track when internet services are broken. To wrap up the year, the website has shared its list of the 10 biggest internet outages of 2022. Have a guess which service took the top spot? Here’s the full list…

It doesn’t long to make a huge impact when it comes to internet outages. For example, it was just two hours of downtime that sent three services to the top of Downdetector’s list for the year.

A failure of the same cloud-hosted service discovery system on March 8 was the cause of both Spotify and Discord experiencing two of the top three worst outages of the year. Meta’s WhatsApp came in with the second-worst outage of the year.

Downdetector has ranked the outages based on the number of reports it saw. Spotify just edged out WhatsApp by about 20,000 reports at over 2.9 million.

Taylor Swift also got an honorable mention from Downdetector for both disrupting Spotify with the launch of her album “Midnights” and the Ticketmaster outage on November 15.

Interestingly, iCloud didn’t make the top 10! Even though it sees outages regularly, that’s probably due to fewer users reporting the service as down and not seeing a major outage like the services below.

Here’s the full top 10:

Here’s a closer look at the top three outages and details from Downdetector:

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.”

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.”

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.”

For more on the other big outages of 2022, check out the full report from Downdetector.