There are few disasters as unifying as an internet outage. Whether it’s a popular website, social network, or online service, everyone collectively freaks out when it goes offline, as was the case when all three major US cell carriers suffered outages on the same day earlier this year.
With that in mind, the network intelligence firm Ookla sifted through Downdetector data from the first three quarters of 2024 to pinpoint the biggest outages of the year. Based on the data Ookla gathered, these were the world’s 10 largest outages of 2024:
The analysis is not an exact science, as the rankings only take into account the number of user reports on Downdetector during the outage. That said, it’s clear that the major Facebook outage on March 5 impacted more people than any other individual outage in 2024.
It wasn’t an especially long outage, but it was the most widespread of the year (so far). Some of these outages impact a small subset of users or users in specific regions, but the Meta crash hit everyone all at once, which is why it received so much attention.
“The second largest global outage may be the most memorable. While CrowdStrike is not a service most people think of, we saw nearly 5 million reports to services that rely on it (or rely on Microsoft which relies on Crowdstrike), including emergency services, airlines, and ride sharing apps when a routine software update went bad on July 19,” Ookla notes.
Even if you’ve forgotten about Facebook and Instagram going down, you probably remember when the faulty update from CrowdStrike nearly turned the world upside down.
