The 10 biggest internet blackouts in almost 10 years

Massive internet blackout investigated around the world 1:32

(CNN Spanish) -

A massive internet blackout caused applications and websites from around the world to go down on Tuesday, from media outlets like CNN and The Guardian to services like Amazon and Target.

Here we review the 10 largest blackouts recorded by the Downdetector firm since 2012 and who they affected.

To the top of the ranking: a generalized Facebook outage of at least 12 hours in 2019

On March 13, 2019, there was a massive blackout that affected Facebook and the applications it owns, WhatsApp and Instagram, which lasted at least 12 hours.

Downdetector received 7.5 million problem reports.

According to the firm, which collects user complaints and reports when programs or applications fail, it was the biggest cut in terms of bug reports and also time.

Facebook said the failure was caused by a change in its system and denied being the victim of a hack.

The cut was felt on Wall Street: the next day the company's shares fell 3%.

In addition, activists in favor of the separation of the network giant at the time said that the ruling had shown that the concentration of ownership of the platforms was "dangerous" for consumers.

"The more integrated a platform becomes, the greater the risk and scope of epic failures like this," said Sarah Miller, deputy director of the Open Markets Institute at the time.

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Second, but far behind, was followed by an October 2018 outage that affected YouTube and for which Downdetector received 2.7 million reports of problems.

Users were unable to play content for about an hour.

The third and fourth place correspond to blackouts of 2017: one of November 6 affected the social network Snapchat and led to 1.8 million reports of problems and another of May 3, which cut the WhatsApp service, had 1 , 7 million reports.

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Cuts that affect videogames

In addition to social networks, in the ranking of the largest blackouts since 2012 to date, some stand out that affected two video games: Pokemon Go and Fortnite.

The fifth and sixth biggest blackouts in recent years, on July 16 and 17, 2016 respectively, affected Pokemon Go.

In each case there were 1.7 million reports of problems in Downdetector.

Pokemon Go said at the time that it had been the target of a cyber attack.

The seventh largest outage affected WhatsApp (1.2 million problem reports on November 3, 2017) and the eighth again corresponds to a game.

This is Fortnite, which had a crash on April 12, 2018 for which there were a million reports of problems.

They close the list of the 10 biggest blackouts, one that affected WhatsApp on November 30, 2017 and another that affected the PlayStation network on October 21, 2016.

WhatsApp, the most affected

WhatsApp, which has been owned by Facebook since 2014, is the most affected application in the ranking: it was a victim in four of the 10 biggest blackouts.

The messaging service has more than 2 billion users worldwide and was the second most downloaded application in 2020, according to Sensor Tower, ahead of others that gained great popularity in the pandemic such as Zoom (although behind TikTok, which was the most popular).

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What caused the massive blackout on Tuesday?

Tuesday's outage was tied to a widespread failure at Fastly, a cloud service provider that helps improve website load times and provides other services to sites, applications and platforms, including a large network of servers. global. According to an expert, Fastly became inactive for about 50 minutes during the day.