- The AWS outage on October 20 disrupted global services and affected 17 million users for more than 15 hours
- PlayStation Network outage on February 7 left 3.9 million players out for more than 24 hours
- Cloudflare, Vodafone and regional telecommunications also suffered major disruptions, hitting the US, Canada and Europe the hardest.
For many people, the year 2025 will be remembered for: downtime. Some of the largest and most disruptive incidents occurred this year, impacting the revenue and customer trust of countless businesses.
To wrap up the year, technology company Ookla released a new report summarizing the key events that occurred this year and their effects on the overall market.
According to the report, the biggest loser was the Internet infrastructure itself. The most disturbing incident of the year was an Amazon web service outage that occurred on October 20. This triggered more than 17 million reports from users worldwide and lasted more than 15 hours.
Millions of people affected
It was caused by a flaw in AWS’s automated DNS management system for DynamoDB in the US-EAST-1 region, and it spread far beyond Amazon itself, taking down services ranging from Netflix and Snapchat to major e-commerce platforms.
Similarly, Cloudflare suffered a crash of its core infrastructure 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, leaving 3.9 million users without access to titles like Call of Duty and Fortnite for more than 24 hours. In both the US and Europe, PlayStation topped the charts as the most reported disruption event of the year, surpassing even YouTube.
Unlike cloud-related failures, the data suggests that this outage was due to internal PSN issues, highlighting that even vertically integrated platforms remain vulnerable.
Finally, telecommunications also suffered the consequences, especially at the regional level. In Europe, a Vodafone blackout in the UK disrupted broadband, 4G and 5G services, while in Latin America and the Middle East blackouts affected both banks and telecoms providers.
Geographically, the United States and Canada suffered the most. The largest concentration of high-impact outages (the top three incidents each exceeded one million reports) occurred across the pond.
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