8 major websites that you won’t believe went down in April

I don’t like to be the bearer of bad news, on the contrary, I think that the more we talk about website downtime, the more people that will be aware that it happens to the best of us. I’ve put together some of the most well-known companies in the world on this April’s downtime list so you can see for yourself just how easy it is for your website to go down, regardless of how many pennies are in the bank. 

Website down: MailChimp

The go-to marketing automation platform for thousands across the globe saw an outage on 14th April at prime time working hour 2pm. Had an email scheduled to 100,000 recipients for that time? Doesn’t bear thinking about. But MailChimp is very customer-orientated and focused on getting its website back up and working to its full potential in a matter of minutes. Something that some of the other companies on the list could really take note of…

Website down: TikTok

This powerhouse of a social media app is used by millions of people, especially since influencers turned to video to start promoting new products and services. But unfortunately for TikTok’s users, it suffered the dreaded website downtime on 14th April at 10.50am causing users to turn to rivals Twitter to voice their complaints. Not ideal when you’re in direct competition with one another; there must just be something about Wednesdays…

Website down: Facebook

Facebook’s had a rough old time of it lately. From shutting down news pages in Australia to stopping their Facebook Analytics service, to now another website outage. I’m not sure if Mark Zuckerberg and his team are too focused on the 533 million users that had their data breached recently, or whether they’re trying to get Zuckerberg’s contact number off of the hacker forums, but whatever it is, their site went down regardless on 8th April for millions across the globe. Bad start to the year for these tech giants. 

Website down: Instagram

Facebook and Instagram now go hand in hand since Facebook bought them nearly a decade ago but that doesn’t always spell good times for the popular social media platform. Unfortunately for Instagram, when Facebook went down, Instagram suffered too with a worldwide outage. The worst part? Now Facebook owns so many of these communicative tools that the widely-used app, WhatsApp, also went down. The sweeping domino effect of website downtime lasted hours, with Facebook’s maintenance team hurriedly working in the background to stop the media from latching onto another Facebook saga. Didn’t quite turn out that way it seems…

Website down: Zoom

Zoom has been doing well this year whilst its fellow competitors like Slack have suffered major outages (mainly on the day everyone went back to work in the new year, sorry Slack). But the Zoom team may have just got a little too excited as unfortunately for them, they too suffered website downtime on 14th April at 10.46am. Needless to say, those of us that had Zoom calls booked in at 11am that day were doing a silent victory dance in our living rooms…

Website down: eBay

This is the first time that popular buying site eBay has featured on the website downtime list this year. Hats off to them, as it’s tremendously difficult to stay online for that long with the amount of traffic they get on a daily basis. However, it did happen to the folks over at eBay on 16th April at 7am. Luckily for them, it wasn’t prime time buying, so they didn’t lose out on too much revenue. Safe to say, it also gave them a good chance to get their website issues resolved before many users noticed the website was down. Sorry for outing you eBay. 

Website down: Salesforce

CRM giant Salesforce is a very unlikely website to go down, especially since it prides itself on its innovative IT services and is relied on by millions of B2B companies across the world. Unfortunately, though, Salesforce felt the full force of website downtime on 14th April at 10.46am. Again, this hit users hard, especially in the UK, when business was booming mid-morning and the use of the CRM failed for sales and dev teams alike. It seems like they felt the full sales force of this one (see what I did there?).

Website down: Amazon

Jeff Bezos might want to sort out Amazon’s website downtime before he steps down as CEO this year as they’ve experienced quite a bit of it lately. Admittedly, the e-commerce website gets massive amounts of traffic all day every day but that doesn’t mean they should be experiencing downtime regularly. They’ve yet to tell us what the issues seem to be, whether it’s a recurring server issue causing problems in the background, but whatever it is, users seem to be growing more and more impatient. It doesn’t help that online sales continue to soar due to the Covid-19 pandemic so more and more consumers are reliant on the likes of Amazon for their day-to-day goods, not just luxury items like in previous years. Come on Amazon, you might have a great 404 page, but it doesn’t mean we want to see it all the time!

Website downtime happens to every website, big or small, old or new, and can be caused by a variety of different things. StatusCake helps businesses to continuously monitor their websites so they’re not caught out by website downtime and they don’t find out about it from disgruntled users on social media. From domain monitoring to server monitoring, page speed monitoring to uptime monitoring, we have everything you need to make sure that you don’t feature on this list for all the wrong reasons.