The worst downsides of the year: the top 10 of the most serious IT outages in 2025

The worst downsides of the year: the top 10 of the most serious IT outages in 2025

Credit: Ookla/Downdetector.

There photograph of the major IT downturns of 2025 returns a clear fact: our digital daily life is based on infrastructures that are most often efficient, but also on delicate balances. When these balances are broken, the effects become immediately visible on a global scale. Over the course of the year, we have seen disruptions that have not been limited to a single service, but have affected entire digital ecosystems, affecting streaming platforms, online gaming networks, messaging services and telecom operators. By analyzing millions of user reports collected by Downdetectorthe collaborative platform that monitors online disruptions through spontaneous user reports, shows that the most serious problems were not necessarily linked to cyberattacks or external events, but to internal malfunctions and configuration defects.

A central role this year was played by the large cloud providershow AWS And Cloudflarethat is, those companies that provide computing resources remotely: servers, databases and network services shared by thousands of different platforms. This technological concentration brings advantages in terms of efficiency, but also exposes it to the risk of the so-called “single point of failure”, a single point of failure capable of generating chain effects on multiple services and users. In 2025 we saw this with particular clarity: a localized problem often had simultaneous consequences on very different applications, showing how interconnected the foundations of today’s Web are.

The 10 main down syndromes in the world in 2025 by number of reports

Analyzing the top 10 worst tech disruptions of 2025the most impactful downturn of the year occurred on October 20th last and was linked to Amazon Web Servicesone of the world’s leading cloud providers. Beyond 17 million reports they affected not only Amazon, but also numerous services that depend on its infrastructure. The problem was traced back to a malfunction of the automatic management system DNSThe Domain Name Systemwhich is the mechanism that translates website names into addresses that computers can understand. Specifically, the error involved DynamoDBa database service, in the region US-EAST-1causing over 15 hours of widespread outages.

In second place we find the down del PlayStation Network occurred at the beginning of the year, more precisely the February 7. With almost 4 million reports Globally, the outage affected millions of players from major online titles for more than a day. The analyzes indicated a internal cause within the Sony networkwithout direct responsibility of cloud providers or ISPThe Internet Service Providers that provide connection to end users.

Followed, in third place, by global blackout Of Cloudflare of November 18th. Cloudflare is a company that provides security and content delivery services: when its Central infrastructure stopped working for about 5 hoursmillions of websites, applications and APIs (interfaces that allow software to communicate with each other) have become unreachable, making clear the collective dependence on a few technological nodes. Below we provide you with the complete ranking drawn up by Downdetector regarding the most significant disruptions of 2025.

  1. AWS: 17 million reports (October 20)
  2. PlayStation: 3.9 million reports (February 7)
  3. Cloudflare: 3.3 million reports (November 18)
  4. YouTube: 3 million reports (October 15)
  5. X: 2 million reports (March 10)
  6. Google Cloud & Cloudflare: 1.4 million reports (June 12)
  7. Spotify: 1.1 million reports (April 16)
  8. WhatsApp: 890,000 reports (February 28)
  9. Vodafone UK: 877,000 reports (13 October)
  10. X: 841,000 reports (May 24)
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Ranking of the worst disruptions worldwide, which occurred in 2025. Credit: Ookla/Downdetector.

The top 10 IT outages in Europe in 2025

In Europe, the 2025 down picture shows a greater variety of sectors involved. Here it is top 10 of the worst disruptions of the year in Europe.

  1. PlayStation: 1.7 million reports (February 7)
  2. Snapchat: 990,000 reports (October 20)
  3. Vodafone UK: 833,000 reports (13 October)
  4. WhatsApp: 621,000 reports (February 28)
  5. YouTube: 490,000 reports (15 October)
  6. Spotify: 468,000 reports (April 16)
  7. X: 382,000 reports (March 10)
  8. Odido: 382,000 reports (25 June)
  9. Odido: 357,000 reports (June 15)
  10. Cloudflare: 326,000 reports (18 November)
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Ranking of the worst disruptions at European level, which occurred in 2025. Credit: Ookla/Downdetector.