2025's biggest internet outages and what caused them
Downdetector by Ookla has revealed the largest internet outages of 2025, based on millions of user reports worldwide. The data shows where internet services failed at scale and how outages tied to cloud platforms, gaming networks, and streaming services affected users across North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East and Africa..
North America was naturally the region with the highest concentration of high-impact outages. In the US and Canada, the three largest single-service incidents each passed one million user reports, showing how quickly problems were spotted when widely used platforms went offline.
PlayStation Network recorded the highest number of reports in the region, reaching 1.6 million during a major network-wide disruption. YouTube followed closely with 1.5 million reports tied to a global streaming issue. An AWS outage generated 1.2 million reports, with knock-on effects that also pushed large numbers of users to pages for affected services like Snapchat.
Globally, cloud infrastructure failures topped the list. The largest worldwide incident of 2025 stemmed from an AWS outage that generated more than 17 million reports across Amazon services and other platforms that depended on its infrastructure. The issue lasted over 15 hours and was traced to a failure in automated DNS management tied to DynamoDB in the US-EAST-1 region. That single fault disrupted services ranging from streaming platforms to e-commerce sites.
The second-largest global outage affected the gaming sector. PlayStation Network logged more than 3.9 million reports during a disruption that lasted over 24 hours. Users were locked out of major online games, and analysis attributed the cause to internal PSN systems rather than cloud providers or internet service providers.
Cloudflare accounted for the third-largest global outage of the year. A core infrastructure failure led to over 3.3 million reports worldwide during a disruption that lasted nearly five hours. Websites, applications, and APIs that relied on Cloudflare were affected simultaneously, showing how much centralized services can amplify outages.
Europe internet outages
Europe saw a mix of global platform issues and regional telecom failures. PlayStation Network again topped the list with 1.7 million reports. Snapchat and WhatsApp also saw large spikes, while a Vodafone outage in the UK affected broadband, 4G, and 5G users after a software issue involving a vendor partner. Spotify recorded hundreds of thousands of reports, making it one of the region’s largest non-video streaming outages.
In the Asia Pacific region, social media and cloud services failures dominated. X led with more than 645,000 reports, followed by Snapchat and YouTube. AWS-related outages also appeared multiple times in the regional data, due to repeated cloud failures.
Latin America’s largest incidents included YouTube and AWS outages, alongside regional disruptions affecting WhatsApp and Banco Itaú. Both global platforms and local financial services can generate widespread user impact when problems occur.
In the Middle East and Africa, telecom providers topped the list. Du recorded the largest regional outage, while Cloudflare and Snapchat also saw big spikes during global incidents.
Across the world, Downdetector's data reveals a consistent pattern. Digital services are deeply embedded in daily life, but many rely on a small number of shared systems. When those systems fail, disruption spreads quickly and widely.
Which outages affected you the most in 2025? Let us know in the comments.
