Facebook, CrowdStrike, AT&T: 2024’s Top Tech Outages Revealed
In 2024, widespread disruptions in popular online services highlighted the profound extent of our dependence on technology. An analysis of Downdetector data for the first three quarters of 2024 identified the most significant outages, affecting millions of users globally.
The most impactful incident occurred on March 5, involving Facebook, with over 11.1 million people reporting issues accessing the platform.
Ranking second was the CrowdStrike outage on July 19, which disrupted Microsoft’s ecosystem, leading to cascading failures in airlines, taxi services, and emergency response systems. Parametrix, a leading provider of cloud monitoring, modeling, and insurance services, estimated direct financial losses for Fortune 500 companies (excluding Microsoft) at $5.4 billion due to the CrowdStrike incident.
AT&T experienced the third largest network failure when a configuration error rendered millions of users across the U.S. without connectivity for 12 hours.
Asia-Pacific Region
In this region, the largest outage was also linked to Facebook on March 5, with over 908,000 complaints logged, while Instagram reported the second most significant disruption. Additionally, a Microsoft 365 outage in June impacted more than 168,000 users, with 139,000 of them in Japan. Localized issues were notable as well, such as PayPay’s 76,000 complaints in May and Jio’s 65,000 reports of disruption in India during September.
Europe
European users were heavily affected by social media outages. The March 5 Facebook incident prompted more than 3.4 million complaints, while WhatsApp’s April 3 outage resulted in 1.1 million reports. Other notable disruptions involved German companies 1&1 and Deutsche Telekom, which received 218,000 and 209,000 complaints, respectively.
Latin America
In Latin America, the pattern mirrored Europe’s, with Facebook leading in complaints at nearly 850,000, followed by Instagram with 260,000 and WhatsApp with 420,000. Localized disruptions included outages of the Mexican operator Bait and Brazil’s Nubank.
Middle East and Africa
This region faced both global and localized outages, with significant incidents including Microsoft 365 and Facebook disruptions in March. In South Africa, the telecommunications operator Telkom logged nearly 55,000 complaints on May 13, alongside issues with MTN, Vodacom, and du.
United States and Canada
In North America, Facebook topped the complaint charts with over 5.8 million reports during its March 5 outage. CrowdStrike and AT&T outages triggered 5 million and 3.4 million complaints, respectively. Other significant incidents included disruptions in gaming platforms and telecommunications providers.
The analysis of major outages in 2024 underscores how large-scale service interruptions can profoundly disrupt the daily lives of millions. These events emphasize the critical importance of reliable internet services and infrastructure, which underpin the operations of both global enterprises and local services. As technological dependence grows, ensuring the resilience of digital systems becomes an increasingly pressing challenge.
