5 Websites That Frequently Go Down

Very few things are as frustrating as doing something on your computer or phone, and then all of a sudden, it’s not working. We tend to first blame our equipment and throw around a few choice words, but it might not be a problem on your end at all. There are certain websites that are known to go down pretty frequently, so the problem could be on their end instead of yours. Here are the five websites that go down the most frequently, telling users that sometimes “it’s not you, it’s me.”

1. Discord

While there are plenty of voice, video, and instant messaging apps available, Discord is the one that has caught on most with the younger generations as it’s more casual than business. Discord is popular with gamers for voice chat and has communities for online interests, increasing in popularity on a large scale each year.

Due to the insane amount of bandwidth that’s required for so many video chats and different channels while also increasing dramatically in users on a daily basis, Discord is suscept to crashes quite frequently. The servers aren’t able to keep up sometimes, and Discord has been known to go down for hours at a time on occasion, though becoming more of a rarity as the years go on.

2. Steam

Game launchers are all of the rage for publishers, but the original will likely be the most popular until the end of time, and that’s Steam. Steam launched back in 2003 and has been a mainstay of the internet ever since, with people from all over the world using the client to download and play games, most of which are played online.

When a popular new game comes out, Steam can sometimes crash due to the influx in web traffic as people get their hands on the game. On a daily basis, you’ll see Steam crash in many major cities around the world, though it doesn’t tend to last for long. So many people downloading the same game at once can cause the servers to hiccup.

3. Instagram

Instagram may be the most surprising website to be featured on the list since most of the website is simply images being posted by people without too many frills. However, that hasn’t stopped Instagram from crashing and going down frequently. In most cases, users will find that their news feed failed to load or that they can’t even log in to the site.

Only a handful of cases for Instagram have been because of the website totally crashing and becoming unusable. While Instagram says that the more common issues are because of a user’s internet connection, it’s usually high traffic or a bug that causes your feed to sit there with the loading icon while trying to refresh.

4. YouTube

We go from perhaps the most surprising website to the least surprising. With hundreds of thousands of hours worth of video being uploaded to YouTube every single day, there are bound to be some freezes and crashes on the site. That much bandwidth and data happening around the world at one time is a stress test for servers, even if they are owned by Google.

Typically, YouTube outages don’t last for very long as Google makes more money from YouTube than anything, so they make it a top priority for fixes. Most outages are caused by servers being overloaded or Google performing maintenance so that a major and lengthy outage doesn’t occur.

5. Microsoft Teams

Earlier we discussed Discord and how it goes down so frequently because of its daily increase in popularity and high volume of video chatting and instant messaging. The same applies to Microsoft Teams, especially as the world becomes more virtual with remote workers. Even in-office, Teams is popular for chatting and can crash frequently.

With group video chats that can host hundreds of people, you’re likely to see a slowdown in the video before it ultimately crashes. Those that work for major companies that use Teams are probably surprised that it’s not the most frequently downed site.