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Our most important personal data is located on Big Tech’s servers. When a problem brings a website down, our pictures, videos, games, bank statements and profiles are inaccessible. Have you ever wondered which websites and services are most prone to failure? Tool tester uses data collected by Downdetector over the past 12 months to find out.
The biggest finding was that gaming sites had the most problems staying online, with a total of 211 outages. PC gamers were hit by 99 blackouts last year while trying to use Steam due to issues with the website and online gaming servers. Xbox owners suffered 63 outages affecting Xbox Live and PlayStation Network suffered 49 outages.
Add that Discord, a chat service popular with the gaming community, saw the most outages last year, with a total of 129 blackouts. Then there is YouTube, which is popular with game streamers with 65 failures. Gamers are far from the only users affected by outages, but they seem to be suffering disproportionately.
Social media services have also suffered over the past 12 months. Instagram had 81 blackouts, the third most popular of any service and the most of any traditional social platform. Meanwhile, Twitter went off 54 times, Snapchat 46 times, Facebook 41 times and TikTok 30 times.
The news wasn’t all bad for US users. The number of website outages is almost all worse in the UK. And a few services performed admirably in comparison: Google Maps, WhatsApp, Slack, Microsoft, Amazon Prime and Google Drive were among the top 10 websites with the fewest failures.
Recommended by our editors
(Editor’s note: Downdetector is owned by Ookla, which in turn is owned by Ziff Davis, editor of PCMag.)
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