There are busy days on the internet, and then there are moments when it feels like everything decides to break at once. Refresh buttons get a workout, status pages light up, and users across different services start asking the same question. Is it just me? For one hour in 2025, those questions arrived faster than at any other point during the year.
According to Status Is Down’s analysis of outage reports published throughout 2025, the busiest single hour of the year fell between 4:00 AM and 4:59 AM Eastern Time on December 5, when 28 different services recorded their first outage report of the day. No other 60-minute window matched that total, making it the year’s most concentrated burst of reported service disruptions.
The affected services painted a picture of just how intertwined the internet has become. Productivity tools, AI platforms, gaming services, payment apps, streaming platforms, retailers, and financial institutions all appeared during the same hour. Among the services reported were ChatGPT and OpenAI, Claude, Canva, LinkedIn, Shopify, Cash App, Chime, Commonwealth Bank, DoorDash, Crunchyroll, Fortnite, League of Legends, Valorant, Square, Vimeo, and several others. The variety meant the disruption was not limited to a single industry, but instead touched many of the online services people rely on every day.
The runner-up came just weeks earlier. Between 4:00 AM and 4:59 AM ET on October 20, Status Is Down logged 26 first-reported outages, falling just two reports short of the December peak. While the services differed, both hours stood out because they brought together an unusually wide mix of platforms experiencing issues within the same 60-minute period.
Interestingly, those record-breaking hours do not reflect the busiest time of day overall. Looking across the entire year, 11 AM Eastern Time consistently generated the highest volume of first-reported outages, averaging 598 reports across 2025 after grouping all days together. It was followed by 10 AM with 557 reports, 8 PM with 554, and 9 AM with 550. In other words, 11 AM was the hour when users were generally most likely to encounter a newly reported outage, even though the single largest spike occurred during the early morning hours of December 5.
The contrast highlights two different ways of looking at internet reliability. One measures the hour that is consistently busiest throughout the year, while the other captures the year’s most intense single burst of disruption. The latter was an outlier, but it shows how quickly unrelated services can appear to stumble together, creating the impression that large parts of the internet have suddenly ground to a halt.
Methodology
This analysis covers Status Is Down outage reports published between January 1 and December 31, 2025. Reports were grouped by their Eastern Time publication hour. To avoid counting the same service multiple times during an ongoing incident, only the first outage report for each service on a given day was included. The findings reflect reported outage activity on Status Is Down and should not be interpreted as confirmed incidents or a measure of the total number of affected users.
Image: Magryt | Dreamstime.com
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