In 2025, digital services proved both indispensable and fragile. This year’s largest outages were defined by platform-level disruptions, particularly across video, gaming, and communication platforms, that impacted millions of users. However, given how many individual platforms rely on the same few cloud providers and core systems, the role of centralized infrastructure also played a key role, demonstrating how a single point of failure can still cause disruption to cascade across multiple services simultaneously.
Downdetector® data from 2025 Ookla could analyze millions of user reports and identify the largest website and service outages of the year.
The World’s Biggest Outages of 2025
2025 saw a combination of major outages across gaming, streaming, and social media services, but none were more impactful than the cloud services outages that affected companies across the globe. These large-scale incidents underscored how failures in core infrastructure can ripple outward to millions of users. Here is a look at the largest global outages of 2025, according to Downdetector data.
In Europe:
- PlayStation Network global issue topped the EU list with 1.7 million reports.
- Snapchat saw the second-highest outage activity in the region with 989,559 reports submitted by users.
- Vodafone’s UK-wide internet outage generated 833,211 reports.
- WhatsApp caused significant disruption for its users with 621,763 reports.
- Spotify’s outage recorded 468,334 reports, making it a major non-video streaming event.
- Odido experienced, within 10 days, two separate outages that totaled 357,685 reports (June 15th) and 382,003 reports (June 25th).
