The folks over at ToolTester put together an interesting report earlier this month about website outages over the past year, and the data includes a section on gaming, focused mainly around Steam, Xbox Live and PlayStation Network.
According to ToolTester, Xbox Live had 63 reports of outages over the past 12 months in the USA (the data is said to be correct as of June 25, 2021), while 102 reports were filed in the UK. In comparison, Steam had 99 and 177 reports respectively, while the PlayStation Network had a lesser 49 and 90 reports respectively.
The data comes from downdetector.com looking at the number of outages each month for the last 12 months. The website "calculates a baseline of typical problem reports for each company that we monitor", and "by verifying that issues are affecting a large group of individuals, Downdetector only reports an outage when the number of reports is significantly higher than the baseline."
Here's a bit of what ToolTester had to say about Xbox Live specifically in the US and the UK:
"Xbox Live suffered 63 outages [in the USA], with users reporting online gaming (65%) as the biggest problem. PS5 fell to 9th place with 49 outages, with one of the biggest problems reported by users being unable to log in (64%)."
"UK [Xbox] users experienced 102 outages with the main problem being gamers unable to play online, 68% of problems reported was from online gaming with 29% of problems being down to being unable to login."
While it's entirely possible that these figures might be a bit distorted based on erroneous reports over the past year, they're not wholly surprising if true. Gaming was hit with a massive spike of demand following the onset of the COVID pandemic and social distancing / lockdowns last year, and issues were undoubtedly always going to crop up.
We certainly don't want to paint this in too much of a negative light, as we're sure the teams have been working extremely hard to keep the servers up and running as well as possible during this unprecedented time. Nevertheless, it's an interesting insight into how Steam, Xbox and PlayStation have been coping with the added strain.
What are your thoughts on these findings? Let us know down in the comments section below.
[source tooltester.com]
Comments 9
Anybody running low on "ammo" for the "console wars"? Here ya go. Enjoy!
@PhhhCough You just know that someone, somewhere will use this against the Xbox. Of course, the devil is in the detail; I'd take 102 outages that last ten minutes on the Xbox over the 90 outages lasting an hour on the PlayStation. Not knowing how long these outages last means the numbers are almost meaningless...
@Fiendish-Beaver @PhhhCough I'm more concerned with why the UK is suffering almost twice as many issues than the USA.
These articles have such predictable comments every time so in the spirit of @PhhhCough - Xbox does something not good. Xbox owners defend it. Claim its fine because Sony is worse. Xbox owner will criticise MS for the something not good. Person will be called Sony fanboy. Sony fanboy will come on and laugh at Xbox saying PS is better. Eventually comments about how PS owners are worst fanboys while commenting fanboy garbage in same sentence. Sony fanboy then argues back that at least he has games to play offline.
Right all done and skipped ahead so down the crux of the article - I didn't notice a single outage all year - on either consoles, so everything has been fine from where I'm standing. I do remember the old PSN when it was free and not so reliable. Happier days now.
Did anyone actually have any online issues over the last 12 months?
Let's stay away from the "console wars" stuff, eh?
Personally, I can remember a few instances of major "outages" over the past 12 months, but I assume the majority of these reports were for very minor and fleeting instances.
Plus, if the majority were targeted at "online gaming" (65%), then that may just incorporate issues on Xbox's side with specific games.
Thankfully not had any major issues on either system in the last year. Not playing online generally helps
Wonder if the UK data is skewed higher than the USA due to the number of ISPs that have had issues recently (guessing working from home overloading them more here than the US?).
Sky, Virgin and others have had some well-publicised downtime and from experience users will blame the service they're using before a while later realising it's their connection.
For example, I should very much know better but thought my Xbox had an issue when despite being back up to speed after a Virgin issue, it reported high latency, but realised I just needed to do a proper disconnect doh - did so and the numbers corrected themselves.
Think all 3 services (PSN, Xbox and Steam) have been impacted to some degree by the DNS issues a few major providers have had too.
Overall though I use all 3 and to be honest I've probably seen more issues with Twitter - they've all held up pretty well all things considered
Xbox has had a higher than reasonable number of outages for a while. I remember when FH4 and when RDR2 came out I had about 5 outages lasting most of an evening all in that few month period. I just jumped to PS during that time. It's been a lot better, but there are still a lot of outages. Nintendo and Sony finally reigned in their outages it seems, though I'm more likely to notice XB than PS because I've been playing on it more.
It's all better than the PS3 days though with the weeks long outages. Still, it needs to be more reliable.
It's not like each individual user experiences 100 outages a year though. I can't really even think of 1 major one that affected my game playing in the last year (although I'm sure there might have been a time or two).
The fact that all of these networks (from all companies) run as well as they do is quite an accomplishment, in my opinion. We've just become spoiled. The wifi goes down for 5 minutes, and it can feel like the end of the world.
Edit: Based on some comments though, maybe it's more regional? I game virtually every day, and don't even game on my 'home console', leaving me even more susceptible to outages, and it's just not something I see.
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