Facebook down again: How persistent is the problem and which sites crash the most?
Facebook and Instagram were down again for millions of users across the UK last night. The platforms apologised on Twitter for the outage, doing so for the second time this week after another, prolonged down time on Monday.
Websites go down all the time from more serious issues like cyber attacks to problems in-house, with one of the most memorable outages to date being the Fastly outage.
When the American cloud computing services firm crashed, hundreds of websites from news sites to social media went down, including British Airways, the BBC, Tesco and the Guardian.
It’s not Facebook or Instagram but a range of other popular websites across the country that have had the most outages over the past 12 months, according to a new study by ToolTester, shared with City A.M. this weekend.
So which websites experienced the most outages? The study used DownDetector to find the most unreliable websites.
Social media
Instagram, the photo-sharing app, had 192 outages with 111 outages in the UK and 81 in the UK in the past 12 months.
The most common problem users experienced, in the UK, was with the newsfeed being down with 83 per cent of the reports down to that which left people unable to scroll through new content.
Snapchat was another social media culprit for the most outages over the past year, with users reporting 82 outages in the US. The two most common problems experienced were receiving and sending messages.
Twitter users experienced 65 outages over the past 12 months recorded by DownDetector with users rushing to report the main reason for outages being down to the IOS app (43 per cent).
Sky users
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 per cent).
Following closely second is Virgin Media. Users experienced 235 outages in the past 12 months with the most common problem reporting being with the cable internet.
Gaming website Steam
Steam, the video game digital service, suffered a massive 177 outages over the course of the past 12 months with many users experiencing problems with the website itself (46 per cent) and issues logging in (37 per cent).
One of Steam’s worst outages was 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
Gamers who use Xbox live as their main console for gaming would’ve suffered 102 outages in the past 12 months with the biggest outage breakdown being problems with online gaming (68 per cent) 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 most outages
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 UK, gamers faced problems with Steam, PS5 and Xbox live an average of 70 times compared to the UK who 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.
