Facebook Apps Lead the Charts for Most Outages in 2019: Report

These popular apps clock high active user base but that results in heavy traffic on their servers as well.

Facebook, Messenger and Instagram apps displayed on an iPhone.

(Photo: AP /Jenny Kane)

Facebook leads the chart for good and bad reasons. While it has the most numbers of active users in the world, as well as top-ranked app on Android as well as iOS, it also tops the list for most instances of outage in 2019.

This data has been shared by Downdetector on Tuesday, which says that Facebook’s Instagram was unavailable to users with 21,682 outage reports last year. Interestingly, the same report says Twitter had the least number of outages in 2019, with only 15,952 reports shared by users from across the globe.

Downdetector, is a web platform that is used for tracking outages of popular apps like Facebook, WhatsApp and even YouTube and Swiggy among others.

Coming back outages with Facebook, the report pointed out users in countries like the US, Germany, Italy and Span were affected for about five hours in total. In addition to Instagram and Facebook, its Messenger app also gets a mention, with over 8,900 reports made by users for the platform.

The report doesn’t have details for the Indian market, but with so many outages reported in the last 12 months, we’re sure popular apps like WhatsApp, Twitter and Instagram feature in the top five in the country as well.

The report from Downdetector lists down outages for users across different segment, which includes telecom, financial services, social media and even gaming for that matter. Speaking of which, Fortnite, the popular iOS game saw quite a big outage impact in 2019, as over 11,326 reports have been registered from users, that were mostly from the US.

In the mobile operators category, Vodafone was down for about four hours for thousands of users on 23 October. More than 21,065 users, primarily in Germany, reported having problems with their service, said the report.