- AWS outage on October 20 disrupted global services and affected 17 million users for over 15 hours
- PlayStation Network outage on February 7 locked out 3.9 million players for 24+ hours
- Cloudflare, Vodafone and regional telecommunications also suffered major disruptions, hitting the US, Canada and Europe the hardest
For many people, 2025 will be remembered by – downtime. Some of the biggest and most disruptive incidents occurred this year, affecting revenue and customer confidence for countless businesses.
To end the year, technology company Ookla published a new report summarizing key events that happened this year and their impact on the wider market.
According to the report, the biggest loser was the internet infrastructure itself. The most disruptive event of the year was an Amazon Web Service crash that occurred on October 20. This triggered more than 17 million user reports worldwide and lasted more than 15 hours.
Millions affected
It was caused by an error in AWS’s automated DNS management system for DynamoDB in the US-EAST-1 region, and rippled far beyond Amazon itself, knocking out services ranging from Netflix and Snapchat to major e-commerce platforms.
Similarly, Cloudflare suffered a core infrastructure collapse on November 18, generating 3.3 million reports and disrupting APIs and websites globally for nearly five hours.
The second biggest “losers” were the players. The PlayStation Network outage on February 7 was the second largest global event, locking 3.9 million users out of titles like Call of Duty and Fortnite for over 24 hours. In both the US and Europe, PlayStation topped the charts as the most reported outage event of the year, surpassing even YouTube.
Unlike cloud-related failures, data suggests this outage stems from internal PSN issues, underscoring that even vertically integrated platforms remain vulnerable.
Finally, telecommunications also felt the pain, especially at the regional level. In Europe, a Vodafone outage in the UK disrupted broadband, 4G and 5G services, while outages in Latin America and the Middle East affected both banks and telecoms providers.
Geographically, the United States and Canada suffered the most. The highest concentration of high-impact outages (the top three events each exceeded one million reports) occurred across the pond.
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