- An AWS outage on October 20 disrupted global services, affecting 17 million users for more than 15 hours.
- Due to a PlayStation Network outage on February 7th, 3.9 million players were disconnected for 24+ hours.
- Cloudflare, Vodafone and regional telcos were also hit by major outages, which hit the US, Canada and Europe the hardest.
For many, 2025 will be remembered as a year of downtime. This year has seen some of the largest and most damaging incidents, impacting revenue and customer confidence for countless businesses.
To wrap up the year, technology company Ookla has published a new report summarizing the key events that have happened this year and their impact on the wider market.
According to the report, the Internet infrastructure itself was hit the hardest. The most devastating incident this year was Amazon Web service outage that occurred on October 20th. It generated more than 17 million user complaints worldwide and lasted for more than 15 hours.
Millions of victims
This was caused by a failure in AWS's automated DNS management system for DynamoDB in the US-EAST-1 region and spread far beyond Amazon itself, taking out services ranging from Netflix and Snapchat to major e-commerce platforms.
Likewise, Cloudflare suffered a core infrastructure crash on November 18, generating 3.3 million reports and disrupting APIs and websites around the world for nearly five hours.
The second biggest losers were gamers. The PlayStation Network outage on February 7 was the second-largest event in the world, preventing 3.9 million users from accessing games such as Call of Duty And Fortnite more than 24 hours. In both the US and Europe, PlayStation topped the charts as the most reported glitch of the year, surpassing even YouTube.
Unlike cloudData suggests that these outages are caused by internal problems within PSN, highlighting that even vertically integrated platforms remain vulnerable.
Finally, telecom companies have also felt the pain, especially at the regional level. In Europe, the Vodafone outage in the UK disrupted broadband, 4G and 5G services, while in Latin America and the Middle East, outages affected both banks and telecom operators.
Geographically, the United States and Canada were hit the hardest. The highest concentration of severe power outages (each of the three largest incidents exceeded a million reports) occurred on the other side of the pond.
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