Uptime.com Blog

Outage Alert: Top 5 Outages of Q1 2022

By now it’s no secret that system outages and website downtime are more widespread and frequent than ever. In fact, the frequency of outages jumped 9% in just the first week of 2022. This can be attributed to a rapid increase in traffic and reliance on tech infrastructures – resulting in connectivity, server, and other technical issues that are alternately unforeseen and unavoidable. 

In case the pressure of constantly maintaining complex digital infrastructure isn’t enough, the expectations of users around incident transparency and resolution have never been higher. More businesses are deploying branded website status pages for users to reference when downtime strikes. If you’re looking for inspiration, check out our top-10 favorite public status pages.  

With the first quarter of 2022 in the books, join us for a look back on Q1’s most significant downtime events. 

Southwest Airlines System Outage

Downtime Date: April 2nd & 3rd, 2022

Downtime Duration: 2 hours, with effects lasting into the weekend. 

Downtime Impact: Southwest Airlines canceled and delayed 10,000+ flights over a single weekend. Yikes. 

Check Uptime Status: Southwest Airlines Twitter

Southwest Airlines experienced technical issues following a planned system outage. Yes, you read that right. Sometimes even planned events can result in severe unplanned downtime. The Southwest’s outage forced the airline to cancel and delay flights nationwide throughout the weekend. Although there’s never a good time for downtime, this incident was especially severe because it occurred during a Spring Break travel season that was already experiencing severe weather conditions. The result? A a perfect storm of downtime and delays.

Spotify Application Outage

Downtime Date: March 8, 2022

Downtime Duration: 2 hours and 23 minutes

Downtime Impact: Users were unable to log into Spotify to listen to their favorite tunes!

Check Uptime Status: Spotify Status Twitter

Spotify is the world’s most popular music streaming service with 400+ million users. The application experienced a global outage that was triggered by a cloud-hosted service discovery system. The error denied users the ability to log into their accounts to listen to music proving once and for all that there’s no sadder tune than downtime. 

Coinbase Application Outage

Downtime Date: February 13th, 2022

Downtime Duration: 4 hours

Downtime Impact: A sudden surge in traffic took down Coinbase’s app!

Check Uptime Status: Coinbase Status

Coinbase operates a cryptocurrency exchange platform and notably made their debut during a highly visible SuperBowl ad. The purpose of their ad was to drive engagement, and thus featured a QR code for watchers to use. The good news? It worked! Millions of users engaged immediately – every marketer’s dream come true. The bad news? Their application saw such a massive surge in traffic it experienced an equally massive outage lasting 4 hours. 

Discord Application Outage

Downtime Date: January 26, 2022

Downtime Duration: 3 hours and 48 minutes

Downtime Impact: An API outage took down Discord’s messaging capabilities!

Check Uptime Status: Discord Status 

The popular messaging platform with 150+ million monthly active users experienced downtime in early January. The downtime culprit was an API outage that impacted connection and messaging within the platform for almost 4 hours. The lesson here? APIs can – and will – go down. Lucky for you, Uptime.com has a phenomenal multi-step API monitoring check you can use to monitor your system’s endpoints. 

Slack Application Outage

Downtime Date: February 22, 2022

Downtime Duration: 3 hours and 14 minutes

Downtime Impact: Customers were unable to use Slack to communicate and collaborate!

Check Uptime Status: Slack Status

Oh no, not again! Last year’s 6.5 hour AWS outage that impacted Slack, among other popular apps, demonstrated just how critical the messaging and collaboration software is for 10+ million daily remote and in-office employees who rely on it to work. Configuration changes made on Slack’s side resulted in a sudden increase in database infrastructure, causing affected databases to fail when serving incoming requests.

What have we learned so far this year? No system or website is immune to performance, speed, errors, or downtime issues.

As you’ve seen in these examples, downtime comes in many forms and does not discriminate by industry or service. The key to mitigating downtime is proactivity. Put yourself (and your website) in the best position possible to monitor, alert and report on website performance issues before there are any.

Start monitoring uptime in just minutes with our 100% 14-day free trial. No credit card required, no shenanigans, no strings attached. Just the peace of mind your website deserves for the best availability, performance and user experience possible.   

Admin