Nuran Erkul and Emir Yildirim
22 December 2025•Update: 23 December 2025
LONDON
Internet outages throughout 2025 led to connectivity issues on various platforms, affecting millions of users.
Disruptions affected particularly video-on-demand platforms, video games, and communications platforms this year, revealing the fragility as well as indispensability of digital services in daily life.
Many platforms rely on the same few cloud providers and core systems, which is why centralized infrastructures played key roles in these outages that marked the year, leading to cascading disruptions across many services all at the same time.
Some 17 million global Internet users were affected by the year’s longest outage when a problem at Amazon Web Services (AWS) paralyzed the Internet in October, according to data from the Internet speed and quality measurement firm Ookla and outage watchdog Downdetector.
The AWS outage occurred at a single point at its US-EAST server, disabling access to platforms like Snapchat, Netflix, and multiple e-commerce websites for a long time.
The second-largest outage of the year was in February, when Sony’s internal systems restricted 3.9 million users’ access to the PlayStation Network — the online connectivity infrastructure for the PlayStation — for over 24 hours.
At least 3.3 million users reported Internet outage issues in November due to Cloudflare-related issues. The year’s third-largest outage lasted around five hours and was caused by a problem in the core cloud infrastructure of Cloudflare.
Additionally, some 3 million users reported YouTube outages in October, while at least 2 million users made complaints over an outage affecting the US-based social network X.
In 2025, 1.4 million users reported not being able to access Google Cloud and Cloudflare, while some 1.1 million users reported Spotify outages, 890,000 users complained over WhatsApp, 877,000 people reported being unable to access Vodafone UK, and in May, some 841,000 people reported an outage on X.
The US and Canada were the most affected regions during the AWS’ US-EAST, the PlayStation Network, and Cloudflare outages.
At least 1.6 million users worldwide were unable to access the PlayStation Network during the outage, while 1.5 million people had restricted access to YouTube, and 1.2 million to AWS services during this year’s three largest outages.
In other regions, the most connectivity issues were in Europe, with 1.7 million people reporting no access to the PlayStation Network, while in Asia-Pacific, some 654,000 people reported not being able to access the X platform, some 183,000 in Latin America experienced YouTube shortages, and 28,000 users in the Middle East and Africa reported Cloudflare outages.
