A World Without Light: Moments When The World, Or Atleast Social Media, Went Down

Tracking Four Months of Embarrassing Service Outages

You log onto your go-to app or platform—Slack, Salesforce, or even Reddit—only to be greeted with that permanently-spinning circle, a mysterious error message, or maybe nothing at all. The harsh truth is this: System Down. Maybe the issue gets fixed by closing out and reloading, or just giving it a few minutes. But when a major failure occurs, it can have a massive downstream impact on productivity and set off panic at HQ. And it happens more frequently than you think. You’ll see some of the biggest brands struggle with outages, often affecting millions of people and sometimes denting their bottom line. Everyone remembers Slack’s outage, on our first day back at work after the holidays last month. Netflix had a high-profile outage during the beginning of the pandemic, and Zoom went down this past summer, as well. Like OJ’s car chase or the 2003 blackout, we all suffered together. At a glance, the amount of platform outages appears to be increasing, but are they really? Or are we all just that much more reliant on their goods and services?

Is there anything more terrifying than the endlessly-spinning “loading” icon?

It turns out that's a tricky question to answer, even for the pros. We asked the people at Downdetector, a site which vigilantly tracks such things, and while they confirmed outages have increased, it’s our reliance on them that makes them feel more prevalent. “The average number of online services an individual uses in a given day has undoubtedly increased over time,” said a company spokesperson. “Similarly, during the stay-at-home order, the attention we pay to things going down has probably also increased.” Indeed, our awareness of outages has only grown. When one occurs, even if only for a day—and for some, if only an hour—it’s the subject of The Verge articles or Twitter fodder that most companies can’t help but address. That's because each outage reminds us of the degree to which our lives and our technology are intertwined. When these tech systems go down, a part of the world pauses, too. These are some of the biggest pauses over the past four months, each of which received significant user reports on Downdetector.

Explore the timeline of service setbacks

Lights

NOTION, February 12, 2021

Notion is an online workplace startup, and while its service was out, companies and users had no access to their docs, files, or shared calendars. The company is currently valued at $2 billion. As soon as the outage was noticed, people began discussing Notion alternatives and the risk associated with integrated services.

4 million (est.)

“This problem today has seriously sidetracked my workflow. I totally understand when things happen especially with the Internet! But there has to be a better way to access our workspaces when offline. I left Evernote and Nimbus for Notion. Please don't make me look somewhere else!” via Twitter

When it comes to tracking outages—in both impact and scope—no site is more influential than Downdetector. It offers real-time status updates on global services like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram—any other major platform with a global audience, really. And trust us, there are plenty of them. Go ahead, give it a look now. You’ll see some of the most reputable brands struggling with outages, some affecting millions of people.

USERS AFFECTED

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WHO KEEPS TRACK OF THIS STUFF?

kambi, February 7, 2021

Imagine putting thousands on the line during the biggest sporting event of the year... then your sportsbook app breaks down. You check another book as a backup, but that one’s down, too. Users of DraftKings, BetRivers, and Barstool Sportsbook found out that their platforms were down at the worst possible moment—all because of problems with a common back-end sports gambling provider called Kambi. Many bettors impacted by the service outage had to be reimbursed by the sportsbooks, and DraftKings announced it would terminate its partnership with Kambi.

USERS AFFECTED

OFFICIAL STATEMENT

60 million (est.)

“It appears this outage was caused by a surge in traffic that caused problems for our backend provider. Our DFS (Daily Fantasy Sports) and pools products, supported by in-house technology, are functioning without issue. This incident is why we believe owning our own technology is important.” - DraftKings, via company statement.

SONY, February 11, 2021

For over an hour in the midst of the pandemic, users were greeted with an error when trying to log onto PlayStation’s servers. The PSN status page went red to indicate that Sony’s servers were down and players were experiencing issues. During this time, players couldn’t create new accounts or even play any game that required them to enter their PSN. Unlike Microsoft, Sony stayed quiet and never directly addressed the issue.

USERS AFFECTED

user tweet

114 million (est.)

“Sooo PlayStation network you expect me to go and bond with my family?!?!” via Twitter

REDIDIT, JANUARY 30, 2021

Reddit was the spark for a five-alarm Wall Street freak out. Redditors overwhelmed the trading subreddit r/wallstreetbets, where users were leading a revolt against big hedge funds by backing struggling stocks like Blackberry, Nokia, and GameStop. The good news for Reddit? WSB grew by 5 million users overnight. The bad? The site must have had trouble handling the increased traffic, although Reddit never actually cleared up the issue’s cause.

USERS AFFECTED

OFFICIAL STATEMENT

48 million (est.)

"yes we're down right now, I'll share updates here as we have them. pls don't yell at me” - Reddit social media manager, via Twitter

Binance, January 29, 2021

Though it touts its security, the crypto world isn’t immune to its share of outages. Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, went down after experiencing an uptick in unexpected interest and trading volume. To counteract the increased activity, Binance paused withdrawals for 10 minutes, much to the dismay of many users.

USERS AFFECTED

OFFICIAL STATEMENT

15 million (est.)

“We almost ran out of DOGE coin addresses. Our system couldn’t generate new addresses fast enough to match new users coming in. It’s crazy.” - CEO Changpeng Zhao, via Bloomberg

SLACK, January 4, 2021

On the dreaded first full day of work, Slack suffered a major outage just after 10am EST, and it lasted almost four hours. By 2pm EST, the situation was mostly resolved, but the outage couldn’t have occurred at a worse time for the online messaging giant. Just a month earlier, Slack announced it had been purchased by Salesforce for $27.7 billion. So much for “bringing companies and customers together.”

USERS AFFECTED

USER TWEET

10 million (est.)

"I know how stressed I feel when I have problems with a Dev deploy for UAT testing a sprint release... Slack has prod servers down with Associated Press articles talking about it, I can only imagine the pants being pooped. Deep breath, hope the engineer who cracks it gets a beer!" - via Twitter

Google Cloud, December 14, 2020

For a short time, the entire Google ecosystem—YouTube, Gmail, and Google Drive—suffered a global outage. The company acknowledged the problem at 6:55am EST, and it reported that the issue was mostly solved by 7:52am EST. But the outage still sparked a Twitter trend (#YouTubeDOWN), and at one point, Google’s status page reported all of its products as down. When the services resumed, Google tweeted, “We’re all clear folks!”

USERS AFFECTED

OFFICIAL STATEMENT

Over 1.5 Billion (est.)

“The root cause was an issue in our automated quota management system which reduced capacity for Google’s central identity management system, causing it to return errors globally. As a result, we couldn’t verify that user requests were authenticated and served errors to our users.” - via Google’s Cloud Support Page

Microsoft, November 10, 2020

The Redmond, WA software giant doesn’t have a strong track record with releases. This past November, the moment it launched two new game consoles, the Xbox Live network went kaput. Some users couldn’t even play offline games, as their consoles didn’t recognize them as the owner. Microsoft solved the issue shortly after, but the outage certainly gave Sony and its PlayStation 5 an early pre-Christmas leg up in the battle of the consoles.

USERS AFFECTED

USER TWEET

90 million (est.)

“On launch day? Come on man” - via Twitter

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Microsoft November 10, 2020

November 10, 2020

Microsoft

Microsoft doesn’t have great luck with releases. The moment the company launched its new video game consoles in November, the Xbox Live network went kaput. In addition, some users couldn’t even play offline games. Microsoft solved the issue shortly after, but the outage certainly gave Sony and its PlayStation 5 an initial leg up in the battle of the consoles.

USERS AFFECTED

OFFICIAL STATEMENT

90 million