5 websites that have experienced website downtime in the first half of 2022

There’s a common myth that you may have heard – “only small companies’ websites go down”. This is a classic, especially since it couldn’t be more wrong. Thousands of websites go down, regardless of their size (or the size of their IT team for that), and even Google can, and has, suddenly experienced the dreaded monster that is “the outage”.

So far, we are 6 months into 2022 and we’ve already seen a ton of websites go down. You might be surprised at who features on the list… 

1. Banking websites 

2022 hasn’t been a walk in the park for 10 of the biggest banks around, including the likes of Lloyds, NatWest, and Barclays, after their websites all went down together. The worst part? It meant customers were unable to pay their bills, transfer money, and even access their internet banking.

With such a huge reliance on the internet to do our daily chores in the modern day, this downtime has proven more than ever that the core foundations like the banking websites need to make sure that downtime doesn’t happen. 

It’s currently unclear as to what caused this website downtime, although spokespeople for the banks acknowledged the issues.

2. Spotify 

Spotify saw a surge in users during the Covid-19 lockdowns, as we set about our 3 mile walks and listened to the likes of Justin Beiber secretly and amusingly. However this year, Spotify suffered some mysterious downtime, seemingly out of nowhere. Cut short were our living room dance moves mid-working from home, and instead, we were forced back to YouTube. 

Now we may joke, but this is a classic example of what tends to happen when websites experience downtime – customers go to a competitor. Now although the customers may have always known that that competitor existed, they’ve never been prompted to try them out before but downtime has pushed them to do so resulting in them potentially using and liking your competitor’s product/service more than yours.

3. Facebook & Instagram

It’s becoming a bit of a regular occurrence for Facebook and its counterpart Instagram to suffer website downtime this year. And unfortunately for them, when one goes down, the other follows suit! The main problem being, when you’re the biggest social media platform in the world, your user base tends to be quite loud when you’re down meaning there’s barely a person left that doesn’t know your website is suffering issues.

The biggest problem is, however, that companies small and large, rely on Facebook and Instagram ads to generate sales so when these websites go down, they suffer a huge loss in revenue. 

4. Google

Probably the most unexpected feature on this list is Google. Why? Because when you think of the most popular search engine and most-used website in the world, you think they couldn’t possibly experience downtime! They must have everything working like Charlie’s Chocolate Factory for search engines in the background, with IT people all smiles and loving life. This, however, isn’t the case. Google Maps suffered a massive outage this year leaving people wandering around fields not knowing how to get to their destination (or at least, that’s how we picture it). 

The moral of the story? Even “big” companies experience website downtime.

5. Twitter

Are you starting to see a trend on this list? Social media platforms tend to experience quite a bit of website downtime and unfortunately for Twitter, it hasn’t managed to escape the dreaded downtime monster either. The plus side is, Twitter was only down for a small period of time, meaning it didn’t cause too much disruption to its users. 

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