Downtime caused historic issues in 2025 - but who lost out most?
For many, 2025 will be remembered by outages and lost revenue opportunities.
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- AWS outage on October 20 disrupted global services, impacting 17M users for over 15 hours
- PlayStation Network outage on February 7 locked 3.9M gamers out for 24+ hours
- Cloudflare, Vodafone, and regional telecoms also suffered major disruptions, hitting US, Canada, Europe hardest
For many people, 2025 will be remembered by - downtime. Some of the largest, most disruptive incidents happened this year, affecting revenue and customer trust, for countless businesses.
To wrap up the year, technology company Ookla published a new report, summarizing key events that happened this year, and their effects on the wider market.
As per the report, the biggest loser was the internet infrastructure itself. The single most disruptive incident of the year was an Amazon Web Service outage that happened on October 20. This one triggered more than 17 million user reports worldwide and lasted for more than 15 hours.
Millions affected
It was caused by a failure 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 gamers. 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 single most reported outage event of the year, surpassing even YouTube.
Unlike cloud-related failures, the data suggests this disruption stemmed from internal PSN issues, highlighting that even vertically integrated platforms remain vulnerable.
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Finally, telecoms also felt the pain, especially at a regional level. In Europe, a Vodafone outage in the UK disrupted broadband, 4G, and 5G services, while in Latin America and the Middle East, outages affected both banks and telecom providers.
Geographically, the US and Canada suffered most. The highest concentration of high-impact outages (the top three incidents each surpassed a million reports), happened across the pond.
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Sead is a seasoned freelance journalist based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He writes about IT (cloud, IoT, 5G, VPN) and cybersecurity (ransomware, data breaches, laws and regulations). In his career, spanning more than a decade, he’s written for numerous media outlets, including Al Jazeera Balkans. He’s also held several modules on content writing for Represent Communications.
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