Flightradar24, the plane tracking website that offers live updates about planes in the air, stopped working briefly on Tuesday, according to a report in Independent. According to website isitdownrightnow, that report about other sites going down, Flightradar24 went offline at 12:18 Pacific Time (around 8am IST). Down Detector too confirmed that multiple users have submitted problems related to Flightradar24.
The outage came amid an increased interest in the flight paths of a variety of planes, especially that of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is heading to Taiwan.
Flightradar24 posted a tweet in which it said users can experience issues due to "extremely heavy load".
The prospect of Pelosi going to Taipei, which would be the highest-profile visit by an elected US official in 25 years, has triggered increasingly bellicose warnings from Beijing that have set the region on edge.
Ms Pelosi, 82, has yet to officially confirm whether Taiwan is part of an ongoing Asia tour but US and Taiwanese media have reported it will happen.
Vice News reported that all eyes - more than 300,000 pairs of them - are on SPAR19, the plane believed to be carrying Ms Pelosi when it took off from Malaysia on Tuesday afternoon.
The second most-tracked flight, followed by 7,000 people, is a Taiwanese-operated passenger plane that left Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur at around the same time, the outlet further said.
Beijing considers self-ruled, democratic Taiwan as its territory and has vowed to one day seize the island, by force if necessary.
It tries to keep Taiwan isolated on the world stage and opposes countries having official exchanges with it.
In a call with US President Joe Biden last week, Chinese President Xi Jinping warned the United States against "playing with fire" on Taiwan.
