2025's Internet Disruptions Affect Millions of Users
Video streaming sites, gaming networks, and messaging applications bore the brunt of this year's breakdowns, underscoring both the brittleness and essential nature of online infrastructure in modern society.
The concentration of numerous platforms on a handful of cloud service providers and fundamental systems means that centralized architecture became the weak link in this year's blackouts, creating domino-effect failures that simultaneously crippled multiple services.
Approximately 17 million worldwide Internet users experienced 2025's most prolonged blackout when an Amazon Web Services (AWS) malfunction brought down vast portions of the web in October, based on figures from Internet speed and quality analytics firm Ookla and disruption monitoring service Downdetector.
The AWS breakdown originated from a single failure point at its US-EAST server cluster, cutting off user access to platforms including Snapchat, Netflix, and numerous online retail sites for an extended period.
February witnessed the year's second-most-severe disruption when Sony's internal infrastructure blocked 3.9 million users from reaching the PlayStation Network—the online backbone for PlayStation consoles—for more than 24 hours.
A minimum of 3.3 million users flagged Internet access problems in November stemming from Cloudflare-connected failures. This year's third-largest blackout persisted approximately five hours and resulted from a glitch in Cloudflare's core cloud architecture.
Furthermore, roughly 3 million users documented YouTube outages in October, while no fewer than 2 million users filed grievances about a disruption impacting the US-headquartered social platform X.
Throughout 2025, 1.4 million users indicated inability to reach Google Cloud and Cloudflare, while approximately 1.1 million users flagged Spotify disruptions, 890,000 users protested over WhatsApp, 877,000 individuals documented being locked out of Vodafone UK, and in May, some 841,000 individuals filed an outage report on X.
The US and Canada sustained the heaviest impact during the AWS' US-EAST, the PlayStation Network, and Cloudflare blackouts.
No fewer than 1.6 million users globally lost access to the PlayStation Network during the disruption, while 1.5 million individuals encountered restricted access to YouTube, and 1.2 million to AWS services throughout this year's three most severe outages.
Across other territories, Europe logged the highest connectivity complaints, with 1.7 million individuals reporting zero access to the PlayStation Network, while in Asia-Pacific, some 654,000 individuals documented inability to reach the X platform, approximately 183,000 in Latin America faced YouTube shortages, and 28,000 users in the Middle East and Africa flagged Cloudflare outages.
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