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Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →There is no authoritative cross-industry ranking of the ten “biggest” outages of 2022. The available incident records support five useful cases, but not a defensible top-ten list: Rogers’ nationwide telecom outage, two Cloudflare incidents, a Google Cloud networking disruption, and Slack’s cascading failure. They are not ranked here. Comparing their geographic scope, duration, service criticality, downstream effects, and evidence quality is more informative than treating one severity score as meaningful across all of them.
Why this is not an official top-ten ranking
Telecom networks, cloud platforms, edge networks, and workplace apps serve different purposes and affect people in different ways when they fail. A few hours of disruption to a national carrier can have consequences unlike a partial error spike at an infrastructure provider. No single measure captures those differences.
The incidents below are selected for their documented scope, service significance, and available postmortems or regulatory records—not because a universal severity scale placed them in this order. The reporting is also uneven: some sources establish a duration or facility count, while others do not establish a complete customer impact or timeline.
Five documented outages and what the records establish
| Incident | What the available record establishes | Evidence and limits |
|---|---|---|
| Rogers Communications, Canada — July 8 | A nationwide disruption affected wireless and wireline services. | Rogers acknowledged the outage; the CRTC commissioned a later assessment of network architecture, resiliency, change management, and incident management. The sources cited here do not give a comparable duration figure. |
| Slack — February 22 | Many users could not connect during a cascading failure involving service discovery and cache behavior. | Slack Engineering’s postmortem describes multiple contributing factors; it does not reduce the cause to one faulty command. |
| Google Cloud Networking — June 7 | A disruption lasting 3 hours and 12 minutes involved packet loss for egress traffic to Middle East users and customers, plus elevated latency between Europe and Asia. | Google Cloud attributes the reduced capacity to two simultaneous fiber cuts and says multiple Cloud Networking products were affected. |
| Cloudflare — June 21 | Traffic in 19 data centers was affected. | Cloudflare’s postmortem explains the routing failure and recovery. The 19-center figure does not mean all Cloudflare data centers or all internet traffic were unavailable. |
| Cloudflare — October 25 | A release rollout was followed by increased 530 errors in a partial outage. | Cloudflare published a postmortem, but the record summarized here does not establish a complete affected-customer count or duration. |
Rogers: a national telecom failure with wider dependencies
Rogers President and CEO Tony Staffieri acknowledged an outage affecting wireless and wireline services across the company’s Canadian network in a public statement. The event stands out not just for carrier reach but for the role telecom connectivity plays in other services.
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The CRTC later commissioned an assessment addressing Rogers’ network architecture, resiliency, network change management, and incident management. That regulatory review is distinct from Rogers’ own acknowledgement of the outage. Separately, the Internet Society’s retrospective discussed dependencies that included payments and other societal systems. Those contexts help explain why a carrier disruption can matter beyond customers’ ability to make calls or get online; they should not be mistaken for a single official count of downstream losses.
Sources: Rogers statement; CRTC assessment; Internet Society review.
Slack: how routine maintenance can meet peak demand
Slack Engineering’s postmortem says many users could not connect during the February 22 incident. During an upgrade of the Consul agent fleet, cache nodes left and rejoined service discovery. Changes to the cache reduced cache hit rates around peak traffic, contributing to a cascading failure.
Slack’s account calls this a complex systems failure with multiple contributing factors. The practical lesson is not that maintenance alone caused the outage: an upgrade interacted with service discovery, cache behavior, and traffic conditions. Read Slack Engineering’s postmortem.
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Google Cloud: two fiber cuts reduced regional capacity
Google Cloud reports that its June 7 networking incident lasted 3 hours and 12 minutes. Two simultaneous fiber cuts reduced network capacity, leading to packet loss for egress traffic to Middle East users and customers and elevated latency between Europe and Asia. Multiple Cloud Networking products were affected, according to Google Cloud’s incident report.
This case shows why a cloud provider’s name should not be taken to mean every product or region was unavailable. The report identifies particular traffic effects and regions; it does not describe a universal internet outage.
Cloudflare: two separate incidents, different evidence
June 21: routing issues across 19 data centers
Cloudflare’s postmortem says traffic in 19 of its data centers was affected by a routing failure. It describes both the failure and the recovery, making this a comparatively specific record of an infrastructure-provider disruption. The affected-facility count is not a measure of the share of all internet traffic lost. Read Cloudflare’s June 21 postmortem.
October 25: partial outage after a release rollout
Cloudflare describes a partial outage in which a release rollout was followed by increased 530 errors. The available account here does not establish a complete customer count or duration, so those figures should not be inferred. Read Cloudflare’s October 25 postmortem.
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Why another Google Cloud entry does not make the list
A secondary incident index flags a July 15, 2022 Google Cloud event involving reduced capacity for lower-priority traffic across Networking, Storage, and BigQuery. The index is enough to identify a possible additional case, but it is not sufficient evidence for a detailed account of duration or customer impact. Without a supporting original incident report, presenting it as a fully comparable ranked entry would overstate what is established. The event appears in the incident index.
How to compare outages without flattening their differences
- Geographic scope: Use the countries, regions, facilities, or network segments named in the incident record. A provider’s global footprint is not proof that an incident affected it all.
- Duration: Compare start and end times only when the source gives them, including its timezone. A stated duration, such as Google Cloud’s 3 hours and 12 minutes, should remain tied to that incident and source.
- Service criticality: Distinguish a national telecom network from a cloud product, edge network, or collaboration app. Their consequences are not interchangeable.
- Downstream impact: Separate effects identified by primary records or attributed analysis from user reports or speculation.
- Cause and recovery: Preserve contributing factors and the provider’s account of mitigation instead of compressing a complex incident into a single-cause explanation.
- Evidence quality: Give postmortems, regulator assessments, and status reports more weight for incident specifics than secondary indexes.
What a defensible top ten would require
A genuine ten-event roundup needs ten incidents with enough reliable sourcing to describe what failed, where, for how long, and with what established effects. It should state its selection criteria and label its ordering as editorial rather than official. The documented cases above illustrate why filling remaining slots from unverified summaries or assuming global impact would make a “top ten” less useful, not more complete.
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