Ookla Name the Top 10 Global and European Internet Outages of 2024

Internet benchmarking firm Ookla, which runs the popular broadband ISP performance testing service Speedtest.net and the real-time outage monitoring Downdetector site, has used data gathered from the latter to reveal which online services suffered the largest outages during 2024 – Facebook’s outage on 5th March tops the table.

The Downdetector service typically identifies and monitors when various popular online websites and mobile or broadband ISPs are suffering from network problems, which it achieves by gathering feedback from end-users – both collected via their own website and the Speedtest.net App.

Admittedly, we would have preferred to see a list filtered by outages on UK broadband ISPs and mobile operators, but no such luck this time. Instead, Ookla has put together a top 10 table of the largest global outages to hit online services during 2024, although we do get a second list for Europe-only that may get a little bit closer to reflecting the experience of UK users.

The eagle-eyed among you will no doubt notice that the 5th March outage at Facebook, Instagram and Facebook Messenger are all linked, although they’ve been given their own separate entries below as most tend to be treated like separate services. But if taken together as a single outage, that would have dwarfed everything else by several times.

World’s Largest Internet Service Outages (Q1-Q3 2024)

Facebook (March 5th) – 11.1 million user reports
Crowdstrike (July 19th) – 5m
AT&T (February 22nd) – 3.4m
Instagram (March 5th) – 3.3m
Verizon (September 30th) – 2.4m
WhatsApp (April 3rd) – 2m
Xbox Live (July 2nd) – 1.2m
PlayStation Network (September 30th) – 1.1m
Facebook Messenger (March 5th) – 0.76m
Roblox (June 20th) – 0.62m

Europe’s Largest Internet Service Outages (Q1-Q3 2024)

Facebook (March 5th) – 3.4m
WhatsApp (April 3rd) – 1.1m
Instagram (March 5th) – 1m
Xbox Live (July 2nd) – 0.466m
Facebook Messenger (March 5th) – 0.406m
Yahoo Mail (February 27th) – 0.357m
1&1 (Germany – May 27) – 0.218m
Deutsche Telekom (Germany – May 21) – 0.209m
Fortnite (March 8th) – 0.197m
Discord (April 26th) – 0.192m

In order to ensure users’ know when an outage is happening, as soon as possible, Downdetecor has also introduced push notifications to the Speedtest® app to give users real-time alerts about the services that are most important to them.