Website downtime: 4 more major websites that have gone down in the last month

Website down. Two words that cause panic in website owners far and wide, especially if they have thousands, if not millions of people, using their website on a daily basis. But it’s not as rare as most people think, even the biggest of companies find themselves in the deep depths of website downtime hell. 

The impact? Loss of revenue for starters, followed up by your competitors who are online getting your customers’ attention, bad SEO rankings, and lack of customer satisfaction. Distressing, I know. That’s why I’m here to tell you about the websites that you wouldn’t expect to go down but have and how it can easily happen to you if you don’t have uptime monitoring in place.

LinkedIn down – February 23rd

Professional networking platform LinkedIn went down for users on February 23rd, causing particular chaos for recruiters who rely on LinkedIn for headhunting and finding candidates. It couldn’t have come at a worse time for the average user either since there are thousands more unemployed people seeking a new job due to the Covid-19 pandemic and using LinkedIn to try and find a role. 

Fortunately, it is a rarity for LinkedIn to experience downtime, especially a worldwide outage like this one, but they did see it happen before back in January 2020. 

Linked, however, managed to make light of their website downtime on their channel: 

Virgin Media down – 10th March

Internet provider Virgin Media experienced downtime on 10th March, leaving thousands of people without internet on their phone and home devices. As you can imagine, this didn’t go down well with most people working from home during the pandemic and reliant on their internet connection for team Slack calls (albeit, it might have been nice not to hear “You’re on mute!” for a few hours). 

Further frustration was caused when users found that the Virgin Media service update page was also down so they couldn’t see any communications from Virgin Media themselves. Users took to Twitter to voice their frustrations, mainly at the fact they couldn’t make important work meetings and complaining about the lack of customer support they’d received. 

Unlike LinkedIn’s reaction to their website being down, Virgin Media didn’t seem to find the funny side with a simple statement from their spokesperson: “The issue which affected some customers’ broadband services this morning has now been fixed. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.”

Reddit down – 24th February and 10th March

Popular forum Reddit has experienced the dreaded website downtime on numerous occasions over the past two weeks, mainly due to the ongoing GameStop shares fiasco. Dubbed “the front page of the internet”, website downtime is probably the worst thing that could happen to Reddit, especially since it gained worldwide media attention after GameStop shares were bought by a group of users on the forum “WallStreetBets”. 

Users who attempted to go onto the site on 24th February were faced with a 503 error message and immediately took to Twitter to voice concerns. Thousands of users used the #redditdown hashtag, causing more people to get involved and Tweet Reddit directly. 

Users hoped that would be the end of Reddit’s website downtime until it happened again on 10th March. Reddit is yet to explain what is causing these outages but users are growing increasingly impatient with the site. 

Netflix down – 3rd March

As Lockdown 3.0 has us hibernating in our houses, TV streaming platforms like Netflix have proven more popular than ever, especially as we have almost nothing else to entertain ourselves with (arguments to the contrary include that sales of adult paint by numbers sets has actually increased during this time). It, therefore, caused outrage amongst the Netflix users across the UK when it experienced downtime on 3rd March. 

Netflix users were met with an NSES-500 error and again, took to Twitter with concern at the thought of having to time travel back to 2003 and potentially have to play a DVD to watch a film. Luckily for them, Netflix managed to get their site back up and running within a few hours meaning I could finally watch the last episode of Bridgerton (after work, obviously…). 

These are just a few of the websites that have experienced downtime in the past few weeks, not including the National Lottery and Asda that both saw outages in February that feature in my previous downtime post. 

The solution? Uptime monitoring. Not meaning to toot our own horn as the classic line goes but it really is so important to make sure you monitor when your website is online. At least when you know you’re experiencing downtime, in whichever location it may be or worldwide like LinkedIn, you can actively do something about it before you lose revenue and damage customer satisfaction.