Study Shows Instagram is the No. 1 Social Media App with Outages
When things break down it’s no fun. A new study by ToolTester decided to investigate the most popular websites across the country to find out which have had the most outages over the past 12 months.
Websites go down all the time from more serious issues like cyber attacks to problems in-house. One of the most memorable outages to date being the Fastly outage, an American cloud computing services firm, caused hundreds of websites from news sites to social media to go down. That was no fun.
So which websites experienced the most outages? The study used DownDetector to find the most unreliable websites. Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter are in the top 10 for the worst downtime for social media apps. Instagram, the photo-sharing app, had 192 outages with 81 outages in the US and 111 in the UK in the past 12 months. The most common problem users experience, in the US, was with the newsfeed being down with 71% of the reports down to that which left people unable to scroll through new content.
Snapchat was another social media culprit for the most outages over the past year, with users reporting 46 outages in the US. The 2 most common problems experienced were receiving and sending messages. Twitter users experienced 54 outages over the past 12 months recorded by DownDetector with users rushing to report the main reason for outages being down to the website not loading (55%).
If you are a gamer, congrats because you face the most problems. Discord, the instant messaging service, used for video calls and messaging easily when playing pc games takes number one for the most outages. The service had 129 outages with 87% of the problems coming from connection issues. Steam, the video game digital service, suffered a massive 99 outages over the course of the past 12 months with many users experiencing problems with the website itself (46%) and issues logging in (37%).
One of Steam’s worst outages was when they released the new cyberpunk 77 game and users flooded to the site to purchase it, which subsequently caused it to crash. On that day there were over 29,000 reported issues on DownDetector in just the US alone. Gamers who use Xbox live as their main console for gaming would’ve suffered 63 outages in the past 12 months with the biggest outage breakdown being problems with online gaming (65%) as users reported getting kicked out of games and being unable to connect to the network. Compared to Xbox Live, the PS network had only 49 outages with the top reason for the outages being reported due to problems with logging in.
The gaming sector had the highest average number of issues over the past 12 months according to reports from DownDetector with a total average of 193 issues. In the US, gamers faced problems with Steam, PS5 and Xbox live an average of 70 times compared to the UK who suffered an average of 123 issues. Social media users suffered the worst in the UK with an overall average of 63 issues over the course of the past 12 months.
