Internet Outages Cost Companies Upwards of $10 Million per Month

97% of companies assert a reliable, resilient Internet Stack is of utmost importance to their business success
Learn more about Catchpoint

Almost all (97%) of respondents state that a reliable, resilient Internet Stack is of the utmost importance to their business success, according to Catchpoint's inaugural Internet Resilience Report.

CEOs and company boards are prioritizing Internet resilience as a critical factor in maintaining and enhancing business operations. The Internet's complexity and its vital role in connecting businesses and customers necessitate a holistic resilience strategy. Companies rely on the Internet for connectivity and digital experiences, and outages can add up to many millions of dollars, making the need for Internet Resilience a board-level discussion. In 2024, any business, whether involved in eCommerce or operating with a distributed or remote workforce, must ensure strong Internet resilience.

Based on insights gathered from 310 digital business leaders, key findings from the new report revealed: 

■ 78% identify improved customer experience as the primary driver for resilience programs. 

■ 77% highlight the critical role of third-party technology providers in their Internet resilience strategies. 

■ 43% estimate a total economic impact or loss of more than $1 million monthly due to Internet outages or degradations and some Internet outages cost some companies upward of $10 million a month. 

■ 40% cite talent and skillset as a major barrier to implementing IPM. 

"Our findings highlight the criticality of Internet Resilience in our always-on, digital-first world," said Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of Catchpoint. "Businesses must expand their observability boundaries beyond Application Performance Monitoring to include Internet Performance Monitoring. This is the best way to proactively address issues impacting operations as it is the only way to get real-time insights and ensure superior performance that can reduce risks to both reputation and revenue."
 

Catchpoint's report provides actionable insights for businesses to enhance their Internet Resilience, and their top suggestions include:

Think about Resilience from the Top Down

Leaders must incorporate Internet resilience into their strategic plans and daily operations to instill an effective, long-term culture of resilience. This includes the implementation of a new role, that of chief reliability or chief resilience officer to the C-suites, something Fortune 2000 companies are increasingly doing.

Align Internally

Break down organizational silos and foster collaboration between IT and business teams to ensure alignment and a focused, constructive response to outages.

Implement Internet Performance Monitoring

Utilize objective, independent IPM data to settle disputes and remove emotion from the equation, while setting Service Level Objectives (SLOs) to guide actions during incidents. The longer mean time to repair (MTTR) takes, the more the risk of payouts and other ramifications increases, including the threat of decreased customer loyalty — be sure to equip your ITOps team with the tools they need to continue to succeed. As the Internet continues to be an indispensable resource for businesses, ensuring its resilience is paramount. 

"Internet resilience should be a critical part of your overall Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity program," said Pete Charlton, IT Vice President, TMNAS. "Ultimately the CIO/CTO is accountable for the organization's digital resilience, but these are not just technology problems. Resilience and business continuity are in fact overall organizational issues that need to be discussed at the organization's highest levels and tested as frequently as possible. Obviously, you cannot simulate every possible outage, but if the past few years have taught us anything, it is that you need to plan for the unexpected."

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Internet Outages Cost Companies Upwards of $10 Million per Month

97% of companies assert a reliable, resilient Internet Stack is of utmost importance to their business success
Learn more about Catchpoint

Almost all (97%) of respondents state that a reliable, resilient Internet Stack is of the utmost importance to their business success, according to Catchpoint's inaugural Internet Resilience Report.

CEOs and company boards are prioritizing Internet resilience as a critical factor in maintaining and enhancing business operations. The Internet's complexity and its vital role in connecting businesses and customers necessitate a holistic resilience strategy. Companies rely on the Internet for connectivity and digital experiences, and outages can add up to many millions of dollars, making the need for Internet Resilience a board-level discussion. In 2024, any business, whether involved in eCommerce or operating with a distributed or remote workforce, must ensure strong Internet resilience.

Based on insights gathered from 310 digital business leaders, key findings from the new report revealed: 

■ 78% identify improved customer experience as the primary driver for resilience programs. 

■ 77% highlight the critical role of third-party technology providers in their Internet resilience strategies. 

■ 43% estimate a total economic impact or loss of more than $1 million monthly due to Internet outages or degradations and some Internet outages cost some companies upward of $10 million a month. 

■ 40% cite talent and skillset as a major barrier to implementing IPM. 

"Our findings highlight the criticality of Internet Resilience in our always-on, digital-first world," said Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of Catchpoint. "Businesses must expand their observability boundaries beyond Application Performance Monitoring to include Internet Performance Monitoring. This is the best way to proactively address issues impacting operations as it is the only way to get real-time insights and ensure superior performance that can reduce risks to both reputation and revenue."
 

Catchpoint's report provides actionable insights for businesses to enhance their Internet Resilience, and their top suggestions include:

Think about Resilience from the Top Down

Leaders must incorporate Internet resilience into their strategic plans and daily operations to instill an effective, long-term culture of resilience. This includes the implementation of a new role, that of chief reliability or chief resilience officer to the C-suites, something Fortune 2000 companies are increasingly doing.

Align Internally

Break down organizational silos and foster collaboration between IT and business teams to ensure alignment and a focused, constructive response to outages.

Implement Internet Performance Monitoring

Utilize objective, independent IPM data to settle disputes and remove emotion from the equation, while setting Service Level Objectives (SLOs) to guide actions during incidents. The longer mean time to repair (MTTR) takes, the more the risk of payouts and other ramifications increases, including the threat of decreased customer loyalty — be sure to equip your ITOps team with the tools they need to continue to succeed. As the Internet continues to be an indispensable resource for businesses, ensuring its resilience is paramount. 

"Internet resilience should be a critical part of your overall Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity program," said Pete Charlton, IT Vice President, TMNAS. "Ultimately the CIO/CTO is accountable for the organization's digital resilience, but these are not just technology problems. Resilience and business continuity are in fact overall organizational issues that need to be discussed at the organization's highest levels and tested as frequently as possible. Obviously, you cannot simulate every possible outage, but if the past few years have taught us anything, it is that you need to plan for the unexpected."

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As AI Scales Across Enterprises, Breaking Points Emerge

Rapid AI adoption and the unique ways AI workloads operate is redefining the scope and structure of what these teams must deliver. This shift is forcing organizations to rethink how they manage scale, automation, and control, according to The State of SRE and Platform Engineering 2026, a new report from Dynatrace ...

Preparing Network Infrastructure for AI Starts with the Basics

AI is usually talked about as a software tool, but it also depends heavily on the network behind it. Whether a company is using AI for chatbots, automation, monitoring, analytics, or employee support, all of that information has to move across the network in a reliable and secure way. That means AI is not just an application decision. It is also an infrastructure decision. Before organizations rush into AI, they should ask a simple question: Is our network ready to support it? ...

Agentic Operations Begin with Governed Middleware Access

Enterprise AI often lacks governed access to where business processes actually execute. Without that access, AI agents may be able to reason, but they cannot operate reliably across enterprise workflows. For AI agents to effectively carry out workflows, they will require integration-layer context and controls. Organizations can implement these prerequisites by providing AI with managed access to the middleware layer ...

The Network Data Problem Slowing Down Enterprise AIOps

Enterprise networks rarely behave the same way for very long. A routing adjustment in one region may unexpectedly alter application performance in another. A cloud migration may introduce hidden dependencies that go unnoticed until an outage occurs. All the while, the network is managed by several different teams, each of whom use different tool sets — and as a result, have different views of the network ... There’s usually an engineer who remembers why traffic fails over a certain way between sites, or which transparent firewall was added where. The problem is that human memory cannot scale alongside enterprise-scale networks ...

The Governance Gap Behind AI's Infrastructure Problem

Ask an infrastructure team how confident they are in their ability to govern AI, and most will tell you they've got it handled. A recent survey of 406 IT decision-makers and platform engineering leaders found 86% expressing exactly that confidence. Ask the same group whether they have a formal written AI governance policy, and the number drops to 30%, according to Spacelift's Infrastructure Automation Report ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 27: Observability Unification

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 27, Shamus McGillicuddy, EMA VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, and Parker Hathcock, EMA Research Director covering IT Service/Operations (ServiceOps), discuss observability unification in modern IT operations ... 

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Virtual Private Networks became a cornerstone of enterprise security at a time when corporate infrastructure looked very different from today ... For years, this model worked well. But the architecture behind VPNs assumed a centralized corporate environment—one where the network itself was the hub of activity. In a cloud — first world, that assumption no longer holds ...

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Website outages get resolved just as fast in August as they do in November. I went looking for the opposite: the summer slowdown everyone assumes is there once the people who fix things are away. It isn't in the data we collected, covering 1.8 million confirmed outages across tens of thousands of websites ...

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This year, many of the cloud infrastructure contracts signed in the early days of the AI boom will come up for renewal. As the year goes on, I anticipate we'll see a significant amount of cloud vendor swapouts and multi-cloud adoption, and the reason isn't just GPU depreciation. It's because they're tired of their current cloud providers ...

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There's a moment the many observability teams have experienced days into bringing a new service into production: you realize that the vendor's claims of "intelligent" behavior included a large serving of hype. Their dashboards look nice until they don't, the failure modes are a black box, and no one on the team can confidently explain why the system did what it did at 2 am. Agentic AI is about to force every Ops team to relive that moment at web-scale until they start treating these systems as the dependencies they actually are ...