Flightradar24, the aircraft tracking website, is down.
Users were shown an error message that joked that the website had been “cancelled” in the same way an airplane might be.
It has become clear that the problem is on Flightradar24’s side and is the result of an apparent technical issue.
The outage came amid increased interest in the flight paths of various aircraft.
On the morning the outage occurred, users were tracking a plane believed to be carrying Nancy Pelosi on a controversial visit to Taiwan.
Just before the outage, the Flightradar24 website highlighted the interest in this aircraft, noting that it was the most tracked flight on the site and that it had been viewed by 300,000 people.
In response, a user asked if the site was able to handle such huge interest. “We are monitoring the servers and adding as much capacity as possible,” the response said.
The flight believed to be carrying Ms Pelosi is not yet the one most closely tracked by Flightradar24. That record is held by a flight from Berlin to Moscow that was carrying Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
Aircraft tracking data has also become a key point of criticism for a number of celebrities. A number of online tracking programs use publicly available data to chart the private flights of figures such as Taylor Swift, Drake and Kylie Jenner – leading to criticism of the huge amount of pollution emitted for their often very short flights.
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