Users were presented with an error message that joked that the site had been “cancelled” in the same way a plane might be. He made it clear that the problem was on Flightradar24’s end and was the result of an apparent technical problem. The disruption came amid heightened interest in the flight paths of various planes. On the same morning as the outage, users were tracking a plane believed to be carrying Nancy Pelosi on a controversial visit to Taiwan. Shortly before the outage, the Flightradar24 website had highlighted the interest in this plane, noting that it was the most followed flight on the site, with 300,000 people following it. In response, one user asked if the site was able to handle such a huge amount of interest. “We are monitoring the servers and adding as much capacity as possible,” it said in response. The flight believed to have carried Ms. Pelosi is still not the most faithful to Flightradar24. This record is held by a flight from Berlin to Moscow, which carried the Russian dissident Alexei Navalny. Plane tracking data has also become a key point of criticism for a number of celebrities. A number of online trackers are using publicly available data to map the private flights of celebrities such as Taylor Swift, Drake and Kylie Jenner – leading to criticism of the huge amount of pollution emitted on their often very short flights.
