Largest Internet Outages of 2024: A Year of Widespread Disruptions

In 2024, a series of major internet outages affected millions of people worldwide, causing significant disruptions to daily life, business, and social interactions. According to data from downdetector, the top 10 largest outages of the year were analyzed by Ookla, revealing a complex web of issues affecting various regions and industries.

The most widespread outage of the year occurred on March 5, when Meta went down globally, affecting 11.1 million users worldwide. Social media platforms were some of the most affected services, with Facebook's March 5 outage causing significant disruptions in the Asia-Pacific region, Europe, and Latin America. In the US and Canada, the community was also hit hard by the outage, along with outages from Crowdstrike and AT&T.

Other significant outages included the July 19 Crowdstrike outage, which affected nearly 5 million users, including emergency services, airlines, and ride-sharing apps, due to a faulty software update. Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a major outage on February 27, disrupting services such as Netflix, Twitch, and Robinhood. Additionally, Microsoft 365 and Azure services suffered outages in July, while Salesforce experienced a global service outage in October due to a missing time-specific configuration.

The largest cloud service outage occurred when AT&T experienced a 12-hour downtime in February, making it the largest operator outage in the world since 2020. Verizon, Jira project management tool, and ServiceNow also experienced significant outages, resulting in significant losses for companies and emphasizing the need for disaster recovery and cloud service redundancy.

The widespread nature of these outages highlights the interconnectedness of global services and the need for robust infrastructure and backup systems to mitigate the impact of these disruptions. As technology continues to play an increasingly central role in modern life, it is imperative that we prioritize disaster preparedness and response to minimize the effects of future outages, ensuring that critical services remain available and accessible to all.