Facebook, Microsoft and Telkom on ‘largest outages of 2024’ list

As the year draws to a close, new research has found that Microsoft 365, Facebook and the Telkom outages in March 2024 were the most impactful events across Africa and the Middle East.

The research from Downdetector, a website for reporting outages which is owned by Speedtest.net—owner Ookla, analysed data between the first and third quarters of 2024 and compiled a list of the “largest outages of 2024 at a global level and sorted by region”.

Facebook

Ookla said the Microsoft and Facebook outages were global events that affected not only the region, but users across the world.

“The March 5 Facebook outage also topped the list of outages in the Asia-Pacific region, instigating over 908k user reports to Downdetector and taking Instagram down with it as the second largest outage.

According to Ookla, the second-largest global outage may be the most memorable. While CrowdStrike is not a service most people think of, we saw nearly five million reports to services that rely on it (or rely on Microsoft which relies on Crowdstrike), including emergency services, airlines, and ride-sharing apps when a routine software update went bad on 19 July.

“The third largest outage happened on June 26 when over 168k Microsoft 365 users in the Asia-Pacific region reported service disruptions on the service. Japan was especially hard hit with over 139k user reports from that country alone,” Ookla said.

ALSO READ: Microsoft working on global outages, Capitec says banking services restored

Africa

Ookla revealed that the outage patterns in the Middle East and Africa differed from those in other regions with users reporting about as many issues with local sites and services as global ones.

It said the two largest outages, Microsoft 365 on March 14 and Facebook on March 5, were part of global events.

“The third largest outage in the region was with South African telecommunications provider Telkom. Almost 55k users across Africa reported issues to Downdetector when Telkom experienced an outage on May 13. MTN, Vodacom, and du are other telecom providers that made our list of top outages in the Middle East and Africa during Q1-Q3 2024.”

WhatsApp

Rounding out the top five in the region was social media platform WhatsApp’s outage in April followed by Instagram, Xbox Live, Facebook Messenger and the Forenite game among others.

The reliance on technology is so total that for many it feels like the world is ending when a popular site or service on the internet is inaccessible, and 2024 saw many outages that reminded us how much one such interruption can disrupt the daily lives of millions.

With the many outages reported across the period, it will be interesting to see whether the companies that recorded the downtime will make a concerted effort to ensure that they maintain their online presence.

ALSO READ: Telkom network restored after nationwide outage, users compensated with 1GB data