Spanning over a decade, Downdetector has garnered the trust of users as the reliable platform to report issues with their favorite services and get real-time status and outage information.
The year 2022 witnessed sweeping Internet outages all through its course, leading to the compilation of the ten most impactful disruptions. A revisit is in order, to analyze the major service interruptions that left users in disarray during the initial half of 2023.
This compilation from Downdetector unveils the ten most significant global Internet outages experienced in the current year, shedding light on the extent of user struggles.
10. League of Legends – May 13, 2023
League of Legends players worldwide rushed to Downdetector to report issues with gameplay during a major service disruption over a weekend in mid-May. Hour by hour throughout the day, users noted difficulties accessing the game, totaling nearly 200,000 reports.
9. Microsoft 365 – January 25, 2023
Over 240,000 Microsoft 365 users reported trouble accessing business and education tools during a major outage in January. A suite of Microsoft products were impacted, including Teams, Outlook, OneDrive for Business, Sharepoint Online, Exchange Online, and Microsoft Graph. Reports began at 7 a.m. UTC and continued throughout the day, slowing around 7 p.m. UTC, interrupting morning business hours worldwide.
8. EA – May 4, 2023
A slew of EA accounts and games were down on May 4, 2023, preventing players from connecting to servers or logging into their accounts. Some EA players were unable to access their accounts throughout the day, with the majority of reports coming in between 9 a.m. UTC through 6 p.m. UTC. In all, over 298,000 gamers reported issues.
7. YouTube – February 9, 2023
There were no cat videos, old vines, vlogs, or Mr. Beast challenges available to watch on February 9 when over 300,000 users found their way to Downdetector to report issues with streaming videos on YouTube. There were an equal amount of reports from users unable to access both the website and mobile application.
6. Steam – June 25, 2023
Steam, one of the most popular video game distributors, experienced service disruptions on Sunday, June 25. Over 308,000 users reported issues with the website, primarily citing server connection and login issues. Report peaked around 11 p.m. UTC, interrupting players’ crucial late night gaming plans.
5. Diablo – June 8, 2023
Server connections were down for the game Diablo on Thursday, June 8. This left over 338,000 gamers yelling at their screens on a weekday. Reports peaked at 8 p.m. UTC, lasting through the night until 12 a.m. UTC.
4. Roblox – January 28, 2023
Frustrated players had their games interrupted on a Saturday night, citing server connection and game play issues. Over 470,000 reports were submitted on Downdetector on January 28, resulting in the biggest gaming outage of 2023 so far.
3. Spotify – January 14, 2023
Spotify users reported over 489,000 issues on Downdetector in late January after suffering a major outage. Users worldwide were stuck without music, podcasts, and now audiobooks while the service got back up and running. In all, the service reached peak reports from about 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. UTC, with some users experiencing lingering issues for a few hours.
2. Reddit, March 14, 2023
Over 1.2 million users globally were so enraged they couldn’t reply to other users or downvote bad responses in r/AskReddit that they went to Downdetector to report that Reddit was having issues. The reports flooded in starting at around 7 p.m. UTC and everything was back up and running globally around 1 a.m. UTC, 6 hours later.
1. Instagram, May 21, 2023
Competing social media platforms may be ready to fight in a cage match to be the best, but Instagram took the biggest blow of the first half of 2023 with the dubious honor of having the largest outage on our list. Starting around 10 p.m. UTC and ending around 2 a.m. UTC, users were unable to like photos, slide into DMs, or even scroll through content to capture their attention. Over 2.4 million users worldwide reported issues with the social media giant, making it the largest outage of 2023 so far.
