Execs Expect Major Incident in 2025 as Large as July Global IT Outage

Learn more about PagerDuty

Service disruptions remain a critical concern for IT and business executives, with 88% of respondents saying they believe another major incident will occur in the next 12 months, according to a study from PagerDuty.

The study's findings illustrate how critical it is for companies to implement efficient processes and strategies for preventing major incidents and mitigating damages, while maintaining customer trust.

In today's digitally connected world, IT outages can be caused by everything from cyberattacks to human error.

  • 86% of executives surveyed now realize that they have been prioritizing security at the expense of readiness for service disruptions, causing changes within the company. The reality is that a focus on preventing service disruptions, which can often be security-related, is imperative for organizations today. Preparedness in terms of people, process and culture is key to ensuring disruptions are minimized to limit revenue and reputational harm.
  • 83% of business and IT executives admitted that the July global IT outage caught them off guard, exposing gaps in their preparedness for service disruptions. 89% of executives in the UK, 84% in the US, 80% in Japan and 77% in Australia admit to being surprised by the disruptions.
  • Nearly half of IT executives (47%) believe that insufficient incident management planning will exacerbate the impact of major IT outages on their organizations, a concern shared by 41% of business executives, if approaches to service disruption are not prioritized.

"The PagerDuty study shows that executives around the globe are shifting their leadership priorities with major incidents in mind, with 100% of those surveyed reporting a heightened focus on preparing for future service disruptions at their companies," said Eric Johnson, chief information officer at PagerDuty. "CEOs and their boards are now focused on this issue, and with the accelerated pace of AI and other advanced technologies being deployed, companies cannot afford to delay critical technology infrastructure updates."

Additionally, 55% of executives surveyed have observed a mindset shift towards continually evaluating and improving preparedness instead of a one-time move into investments in new systems or protocols that are now complete (45%).

Other key findings from the survey data include: 

  • A strong majority of executives surveyed in the UK (91%), US (89%), Australia (88%) and Japan (78%) believe that it's not a matter of "if" but "when" these service disruptions happen.
  • While some organizations were prepared for the digital disruption, others were not. Of those that were not fully prepared, 37% of executives said the July global IT outage resulted in lost revenue or an inability to process sales transactions and delayed response times by 39% to customer or internal requests.
  • Organizations that experienced multiple service outages due to the July global IT disruption suffered communication breakdowns between departments (38%), delays in workflow and projects put on hold (35%). Overall, 39% of executives saw an impact on decision-making.
  • Nearly half in the US (48%), Australia (48%), and the UK (47%), along with a majority in Japan (53%) believe that limited access to real-time data tools will further hinder their organizations during an outage, if approaches to service disruption are not prioritized.
  • For many who experienced disruptions during service incidents, the July global IT outage meant a return to the old ways of doing things, as 44% saw increased reliance on manual processes or workarounds following the incident, showing just how much organizations rely on digital tools.

Methodology: PagerDuty surveyed 1,000 IT and business executives who were director level and above, from the US, UK, Australia and Japan. The survey was conducted by Wakefield Research on behalf of PagerDuty.

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Execs Expect Major Incident in 2025 as Large as July Global IT Outage

Learn more about PagerDuty

Service disruptions remain a critical concern for IT and business executives, with 88% of respondents saying they believe another major incident will occur in the next 12 months, according to a study from PagerDuty.

The study's findings illustrate how critical it is for companies to implement efficient processes and strategies for preventing major incidents and mitigating damages, while maintaining customer trust.

In today's digitally connected world, IT outages can be caused by everything from cyberattacks to human error.

  • 86% of executives surveyed now realize that they have been prioritizing security at the expense of readiness for service disruptions, causing changes within the company. The reality is that a focus on preventing service disruptions, which can often be security-related, is imperative for organizations today. Preparedness in terms of people, process and culture is key to ensuring disruptions are minimized to limit revenue and reputational harm.
  • 83% of business and IT executives admitted that the July global IT outage caught them off guard, exposing gaps in their preparedness for service disruptions. 89% of executives in the UK, 84% in the US, 80% in Japan and 77% in Australia admit to being surprised by the disruptions.
  • Nearly half of IT executives (47%) believe that insufficient incident management planning will exacerbate the impact of major IT outages on their organizations, a concern shared by 41% of business executives, if approaches to service disruption are not prioritized.

"The PagerDuty study shows that executives around the globe are shifting their leadership priorities with major incidents in mind, with 100% of those surveyed reporting a heightened focus on preparing for future service disruptions at their companies," said Eric Johnson, chief information officer at PagerDuty. "CEOs and their boards are now focused on this issue, and with the accelerated pace of AI and other advanced technologies being deployed, companies cannot afford to delay critical technology infrastructure updates."

Additionally, 55% of executives surveyed have observed a mindset shift towards continually evaluating and improving preparedness instead of a one-time move into investments in new systems or protocols that are now complete (45%).

Other key findings from the survey data include: 

  • A strong majority of executives surveyed in the UK (91%), US (89%), Australia (88%) and Japan (78%) believe that it's not a matter of "if" but "when" these service disruptions happen.
  • While some organizations were prepared for the digital disruption, others were not. Of those that were not fully prepared, 37% of executives said the July global IT outage resulted in lost revenue or an inability to process sales transactions and delayed response times by 39% to customer or internal requests.
  • Organizations that experienced multiple service outages due to the July global IT disruption suffered communication breakdowns between departments (38%), delays in workflow and projects put on hold (35%). Overall, 39% of executives saw an impact on decision-making.
  • Nearly half in the US (48%), Australia (48%), and the UK (47%), along with a majority in Japan (53%) believe that limited access to real-time data tools will further hinder their organizations during an outage, if approaches to service disruption are not prioritized.
  • For many who experienced disruptions during service incidents, the July global IT outage meant a return to the old ways of doing things, as 44% saw increased reliance on manual processes or workarounds following the incident, showing just how much organizations rely on digital tools.

Methodology: PagerDuty surveyed 1,000 IT and business executives who were director level and above, from the US, UK, Australia and Japan. The survey was conducted by Wakefield Research on behalf of PagerDuty.

Hot Topics

The Latest

Three Strikes and They're Gone: Why Proactive Operations is Now a Customer Retention Strategy

IT organizations have historically measured success by how quickly they can respond when something goes wrong. The entire discipline of Incident Management has been optimized around mean time to resolution, first-response SLAs and ticket closure rates. But new research suggests that even though this is a well-executed playbook, it's no longer enough to retain customers ...

When the Database Is the Problem, Is APM Enough?

Production incidents rarely announce themselves as database problems. They appear as slow transactions, timeouts, rising response times, or an application struggling under a workload it previously handled. APM provides an essential starting point. It can identify a slow transaction path, highlight an affected service, and show that a database dependency is consuming more time than expected. But identifying the database as part of the problem is not the same as explaining what is happening inside it ...

From Cleanup to Prevention: The Future of Cloud-Native Cost Optimization

Cloud teams are under constant pressure to reduce spend without slowing development or increasing operational risk. They are deploying autoscalers, rightsizing workloads, enforcing resource requests, reviewing utilization dashboards, and building FinOps processes around cloud-native environments. Yet the results often disappoint ...

The Real Enterprise AI Risk Isn't Hallucinations

Ask most IT leaders about their biggest concern with AI and you'll hear the same answer: hallucinations ... Today, however, the conversation has shifted ... As organizations move beyond chatbots and experiments, they are increasingly deploying AI agents that perform multi-step tasks. These systems retrieve documents, query databases, call APIs, generate reports, write code, and make recommendations. The issue is not whether the model can reason. The issue is whether the organization can see, verify, and govern the decisions being made along the way ...

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While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

The Corporate Network Is Fading - Here's What Replaces It

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

IT Leaders Must Establish a Network Data Architecture Practice

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

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The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

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TLS Certificate Expiration Is Becoming an Observability Problem

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...