The biggest global outages in 2022: WhatsApp, Twitter, Spotify and more

The year 2022 was remarkable for many reasons, but it also had a few stumbling moments. Many major apps suffered global outages causing frustration to thousands of users and affecting important communication. These outages were caused either by heavy load to the server, foul play by bad actors or a glitch-ridden new feature implementation. But no matter the reason, these became some of the most exasperating moments for the netizens this year. From WhatsApp, Twitter and Instagram to Spotify and Call of Duty, many major platforms became victims of such outages. Read on.

WhatsApp outage

On October 25, WhatsApp suffered one of the biggest outages of the year. Online outage monitor Downdetector noted that a total of 2.9 million users were affected by this outage. During the disruption, the application became totally unresponsive resulting in users not being able to send or receive messages. Many also complained that they were unable to even update status on the app.

Twitter outage

While Twitter faced multiple outages this year, the worst came on July 14. The issue was not limited to a region, meaning users all over the world were affected by it. Lasting close to an hour, users were not able to load tweets, scroll past the existing screen or check the explore window for trends.

Instagram outage

On the same day as the Twitter outage, Instagram also went down for many users. The popular social media platform faced a number of issues ranging from users not being able to log in, refresh the home page, open DMs or even upload new posts. According to Downdetector, more than 600,000 reports were seen during the peak of the issue. The outage lasted around three hours.

Spotify outage

Major music streaming platform Spotify suffered its biggest outage on March 8. During the two hours that it lasted, users were unable to load the app or play any music on it. Notably, the outage was a global issue and users across the globe were affected due to it.

Call of Duty outage

Even video games were not spared from outages this year. On August 16, popular first-person shooter Call of Duty suffered an outage that mainly affected its European servers. The outage was on the PC and console version of the game and not on the mobile application. This outage was before the latest Modern Warfare 2 was released. Players were not able to play matches for close to four hours.