Downdetector by Ookla has reported the largest internet outages of 2025, based on millions of user reports from around the world. The analysis highlights major service failures tied to cloud platforms, gaming networks, and streaming services, impacting users across North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East and Africa.
North America experienced the highest concentration of significant outages. In the U.S. and Canada, three incidents each received over one million user reports, indicating rapid detection of issues with popular platforms going offline.
The PlayStation Network had the most reports in this region, reaching 1.6 million during a major disruption. YouTube was close behind with 1.5 million reports due to a global streaming issue. An AWS outage led to 1.2 million reports, also affecting users of services like Snapchat.
Globally, cloud infrastructure failures constituted the majority of reported issues. The largest incident of the year was an AWS outage, which generated over 17 million reports across multiple Amazon services and other platforms reliant on its infrastructure. This outage lasted more than 15 hours and was caused by a failure in automated DNS management linked to DynamoDB in the U.S. East region, disrupting a range of services from streaming to e-commerce.
The second-largest global outage affected the gaming sector, with the PlayStation Network receiving over 3.9 million reports during a disruption lasting over 24 hours. Users were unable to access significant online games, and the problem was attributed to internal PSN systems.
Cloudflare’s infrastructure failure accounted for the third-largest global outage, with over 3.3 million reports during a nearly five-hour disruption affecting websites, applications, and APIs dependent on its services.
In Europe, a combination of global platform issues and regional telecom failures was noted. The PlayStation Network led with 1.7 million reports, while Snapchat and WhatsApp also saw substantial spikes. A software issue with a vendor affected Vodafone users in the UK, impacting broadband, 4G, and 5G service. Spotify also recorded numerous reports, marking it as one of the largest non-video streaming outages in the region.
In the Asia Pacific, social media and cloud services failures were prevalent, with X leading at over 645,000 reports, followed by Snapchat and YouTube. AWS outages were repeatedly noted in the area due to ongoing cloud service failures.
Latin America’s major incidents involved YouTube and AWS outages, along with localized disruptions affecting WhatsApp and Banco Itaú. Problems in both global platforms and local services can lead to extensive user impact.
In the Middle East and Africa, telecom providers were frequently cited, with Du experiencing the largest regional outage, along with significant reports for Cloudflare and Snapchat during global incidents.
Overall, the data from Downdetector illustrates a recurring trend: digital services are crucial to daily life, yet many depend on a limited number of shared systems. When these systems fail, disruptions can spread rapidly and extensively.
—
