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Millions of people around the world have been impacted by tech outages this year—but which services were affected the most?
According to Downdetector, the 10 biggest outages combined received over 30 million user reports. However, the number of actual people impacted may be far greater because of the wide-reaching effects and the likelihood that not all impacted users will report every outage.
The global CrowdStrike outage in July took down 8.5 million Windows computers, temporarily closed down businesses, stalled airlines, impacted hospitals, and caused problems for many other businesses and institutions, including on some government systems. Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines—which saw its computers go down and struggled to restore them quickly—exchanged tense legal letters with Crowdstrike and Microsoft for months following the outage before ultimately suing CrowdStrike in October. Impacted travelers have also sued CrowdStrike over the outage's resulting delays and cancellations.
Despite all these challenges, Crowdstrike's glitchy update didn't cause the biggest outage of 2024—though it takes second place on Downdetector's list.
(Credit: Downdetector/Ookla)Facebook actually saw the largest outage of 2024 so far, getting 11.1 million outage reports on March 5, with 5.8 million of those reports from the US and Canada. Meta-owned Instagram, Messenger, and Threads were also affected that day.
AT&T was the third-largest outage overall, garnering 3.4 million reports after an equipment issue took out service for over 12 hours in February. AT&T blamed the outage on an "incorrect process" done while it was trying to expand its network. Some theories had already spread about solar flares supposedly causing the outage, though, leading the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to debunk the ideas.
In September, AT&T experienced another outage that impacted thousands of users in multiple states with Microsoft 365 and Azure services. Microsoft said this US disruption was due to a change made by AT&T, which confirmed that this outage, like the one in February, was also not due to foul play.
Instagram saw the fourth-most outage reports, getting 3.3 million on Downdetector on a single day this year. The social media app has continued to gain users this year, seeing 470.8 million downloads in 2024, according to AppFigures data. Instagram and Threads were hit by Facebook's March 5 outage, which Meta blamed on a "technical issue."
Verizon got 2.4 million outage reports on Sept. 30, making it the fifth-largest outage, followed by WhatsApp (April 3), Xbox Live (July 2), the PlayStation Network (Sept. 30), Facebook Messenger (March 5), and Roblox (June 20).
Editors' Note: Downdetector is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag's parent company.