The year is just days away from the end and we’ve seen some interesting trends taking center stage.
It’s all thanks to Downdetector, which makes it so easy to report and track broken internet services, better known as outages.
The website has gone public with its list of the ten most common internet outages in 2022. And in case you’re still wondering who led the pack and who fell far behind, well, the list is right in front of you.
For those who didn’t know, when an internet outage occurs, it has a really big impact. For example, it was only two hours of downtime that resulted in three services climbing straight to the top of this downdetector list.
Meanwhile, both Spotify and Discord featured on the list thanks to a cloud-hosted outage that occurred on March 8th. And that was part of some of the worst outages of 2022. But let’s not forget the likes of WhatsApp, which has gotten really big when it comes to internet disasters, suffering the second-worst in 2022.
Downdetector all ranks outages based on a simple fact linked to reports observed over the past year. Spotify managed to beat WhatsApp by almost 20,000 reports. On the other hand, we saw that Taylor Swift received a similar honorable mention on the site for the same reason. Not only did Spotify hit it with the launch of an album called Midnights, and then Ticketmaster’s major outage in mid-November was also to blame.
iCloud failed to make the list and this is very interesting. The app tends to see outages routinely, but this year seems to have been a notable exception. It could be related to fewer users making reports of this service going down and that’s why it didn’t make the rankings.
The biggest inconvenience is related to the global outage of Discord and Spotify. They patiently waited for the messaging service to come back online. For that period, users had no choice but to resort to voice calls for a catch-up session.
As we all know, Meta’s WhatsApp is definitely an integral service to notify loved ones and friends. And on October 25th, millions witnessed this inconvenience as 2 billion users were unable to use the app for this very reason.
It lasted almost two hours and it’s safe to say that people couldn’t text or make calls. Because of this, WhatsApp is now number two on this list.
As for Spotify, the competition was fierce and we saw the largest global outage in the world. It beat Meta by a staggering 20,000 reports and landed almost 3 million complaints.
Users suffered the biggest outage of all time and then they just couldn’t stream content like podcasts and music for a staggering two hours.
Read more: This year, social media scams resulted in a loss of over $930 million for US consumers
