Digital services became indispensable to daily life and business operations in 2025, but the year also exposed how fragile the global internet ecosystem remains.
The most disruptive outages were not isolated app failures; they were large, platform-level incidents that rippled across video streaming, gaming, communications, and commerce—often triggered by failures within a small number of shared cloud and infrastructure providers.
An analysis of millions of user-submitted incident reports from Downdetector® reveals that centralized infrastructure continues to represent a major systemic risk.
When core systems fail, the impact can cascade simultaneously across multiple services, geographies, and industries.
The World’s Largest Outages of 2025
Cloud and platform failures dominated the list of the most severe global outages of the year, underscoring how dependent the digital economy has become on a handful of providers.
AWS (October 20, 2025)
The single largest outage of 2025 stemmed from an Amazon Web Services disruption that generated more than 17 million Downdetector reports across Amazon and dependent platforms. Lasting over 15 hours, the incident was traced to an automated DNS management issue affecting DynamoDB in the US-EAST-1 region. The failure disrupted services ranging from Snapchat and Netflix to major e-commerce platforms, demonstrating the scale of risk posed by single points of failure.
PlayStation Network (February 7, 2025)
Gaming delivered the second-largest global outage, with more than 3.9 million reports linked to a PlayStation Network disruption that lasted over 24 hours. Users were locked out of popular titles including Call of Duty and Fortnite. Incident analysis attributed the failure to internal PSN systems, with no major cloud or ISP involvement.
Cloudflare (November 18, 2025)
A global Cloudflare disruption ranked third, attracting more than 3.3 million reports. The nearly five-hour outage affected countless websites, applications, and APIs worldwide, highlighting the global reliance on centralized cloud infrastructure and content delivery networks.
Regional Outage Highlights
Note: Global rankings reflect total reports across all affected services, while regional rankings are based on reports tied to individual services.
United States and Canada
North America recorded the highest concentration of high-impact outages, with several incidents surpassing one million reports:
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PlayStation Network (1.6 million)
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YouTube global streaming outage (1.5 million)
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AWS outage (1.2 million)
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Snapchat, impacted by AWS failure (944,675)
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Starlink satellite internet disruption (583,989)
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Verizon telecom outage (515,923)
Europe (EU)
Europe experienced a mix of gaming, social media, and telecom failures:
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PlayStation Network (1.7 million)
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Snapchat during AWS incident (989,559)
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Vodafone UK broadband and mobile outage (833,211), linked to a vendor software issue
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WhatsApp disruption (621,763)
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Spotify outage (468,334)
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Odido Netherlands, which suffered two outages within 10 days totaling more than 700,000 reports
Asia Pacific (APAC)
Social media and cloud services led outage activity in APAC:
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X (formerly Twitter) (645,395)
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Snapchat (399,108)
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YouTube global outage (245,087)
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AWS incidents in October and April, together exceeding 280,000 reports
Latin America (LATAM)
LATAM outages reflected a combination of global platform failures and regional financial disruptions:
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YouTube (183,672)
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AWS (164,011)
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WhatsApp outages in February and April (over 140,000 combined)
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Banco Itaú banking platform outage (73,745), underscoring risks in digital finance
Middle East and Africa (MEA)
MEA’s largest outages featured telecom disruptions alongside global cloud failures:
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du (UAE) telecom outage (28,444)
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Cloudflare global incident (28,016)
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Snapchat outage linked to AWS failure (26,392)
The outage of 2025 reinforces a critical lesson for businesses and policymakers: digital resilience now depends as much on upstream infrastructure as on individual platforms. As reliance on cloud services deepens, failures at the core can trigger widespread economic and operational disruption.
