Twitter down, but which sites have most downtime?
Twitter experienced one of the site’s longest outages for years today (July 14th, 2022), with the social network completely unavailable to users around the globe on web and mobile for almost an hour.
According to Downdetector.co.uk, which tracks site outages, the service became unavailable at 12:55pm UK time, and stayed down for 45 minutes. The site appears to have failed globally, with outages reported in the UK, US and Europe.
The outage was the longest and most severe in years. Although Twitter was notorious for collapsing under heavy load in its early days, with older users fondly recalling the “fail whale” error message (see above), it has not had a multi-hour outage since 2016, when it was inaccessible for two and a half hours.
Now A new study by ToolTester has analyzed the most popular websites across the country to find out which have had the most outages over the past 12 months. Here are the UK sites that experienced the most outages in the last year.
Sky users suffered the most outages in the past 12 months
Sky comes top for users experiencing the most outages in the UK. Sky broadband customers suffered a massive 268 outages in the past 12 months with the most common issue being internet outages (92%).
Following closely in second is Virgin Media. Users experienced 235 outages in the past 12 months on Virgin Media while Steam users suffered 177 outages with many users reporting problems both with the website itself (46%) and issues logging in (37%).
One of Steam’s worst outages came when they released the new Cyberpunk 77 game and users flooded to the site to purchase it, which subsequently caused it to crash. On that day there were over 29,000 reported issues on DownDetector in just the US alone.
Xbox Live ranks above PS5 for the most amount of gaming outages. Gamers who use Xbox live as their main console for gaming have suffered 102 outages in the past 12 months with the biggest outage breakdown being problems with online gaming (68%) as users reported getting kicked out of games and being unable to connect to the network.
Compared to Xbox Live, the PS network had 90 outages with the top reason for the outages being reported due to problems with logging in.
The industries with the highest average number of issues
The gaming sector had the highest average number of issues over the past 12 months according to reports from DownDetector with a total average of 193 issues. In the US, gamers faced problems with Steam, PS5 and Xbox live an average of 70 times compared to the UK where users suffered an average of 123 issues.
Social media users suffered the worst in the UK with an overall average of 63 issues over the course of the past 12 months.
