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More Than Half of Consumers Blame the Brand for App and Website Issues

From broadcast blackouts sending college football fans into a frenzy to pre-sale concert ticket site outages causing widespread hysteria, the inability to get things done in the event of an app or website glitch is taking an emotional toll on consumers in the United States.

In the 2023 Online Reliability Report sponsored by Chronosphere, Gone in a Glitch, 94% of respondents say apps and websites are less reliable today than one year ago, leaving many feeling frustrated (71%), annoyed (65%) and even angry (26%).


Source: Chronosphere

"We live in an age of instant gratification. Regardless of the industry, customers will eventually switch to a competitor if they encounter too many app or website problems," said Martin Mao, CEO and Founder, Chronosphere. "This survey shows that the writing is on the wall. Americans will eventually ditch glitchy or slow apps and websites. The reputation of your brand ultimately lies in the reliability and availability of your digital infrastructure."

Report findings include:

■ 25% of respondents switch to a competitor when an app or website is slow or less reliable than usual.

■ On average, respondents tolerate less than four instances of unreliability before they switch to a competitor or stop using the app.

■ When having problems with an app or website, more than half (58%) blame the brand itself, more than other factors like the Internet provider or hardware.

■ 61% of respondents say they experience unreliable apps or websites once a week with Gen Z (25%) reporting experiencing glitches daily.

■ 95% of consumers report adverse emotions when a digital platform doesn't deliver as anticipated.

■ 1 in 4 members of Gen Z (25%) have cried at least once when an app or website went down.

■ One-third of all respondents say online disruptions are more frustrating than being stuck in traffic or bad weather ruining their plans.

■ 13% feel they are outright owed something from an app or website during an outage, and 16% for Gen Z and Millennials.

Methodology: The survey, prepared by Method Research and distributed by Dynata, involved 2,000 American consumers ages 18+ that spend 3 or more hours a day online, and collected from May 25 to May 31, 2023.

Mao continues, "For any business, nurturing customer relationships is key. Customers need apps they can count on, and if their expectations aren't met, your brand will get left behind."

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Consider a single order represented across order-management, execution, and settlement systems. Each database, message broker, and application may be online and processing its own records correctly. Yet the workflow has failed if related events arrive on different clocks, rely on inconsistent state, or cannot be reconciled before an operational decision must be made ...

AI now exists in almost every IT workflow. In a recent survey of more than 800 IT service professionals, all respondents indicated the use of AI in some form within their organization. But there's a growing paradox: if dashboards are clearing faster and alerts are resolved at unprecedented speed, why aren't IT service desks reporting lighter workloads? The research found that 71% of IT teams said their actual workload has remained flat or increased since adopting AI. This reality appears to contradict what we’ve been told about AI ...

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Two things happened to production incidents between 2023 and now, and they did not happen at the same speed. The first is that a class of dependency that barely existed three years ago now accounts for one incident in ten. Incidents disclosed by AI model and AI application providers rose from 1.7% of all disclosed unplanned incidents in 2023 to 10.7% in 2026 year to date, roughly a sixfold rise; that counts only incidents at AI companies themselves, so the true share is higher. The second is that the time to close an incident has not come down ...

When an AI assistant gives an incomplete or incorrect answer, teams often blame the model. They adjust prompts, switch models, increase context windows or test a new retrieval strategy. However the model may not be a problem. In many enterprise AI workflows, the problem begins inside the document-ingestion pipeline ...

If you talk to any security or observability teams right now, they're all fighting the same fire: their tooling was built to ingest X, but their sources are pumping Y and soon to be doing Z. The knee-jerk reaction is always the same: we need more platform. However, this reaction is wrong. Let me explain why, because the solution to this problem is foundational, not financial. Instead of hurling yet more money at the problem, make sure you've done what's needed upstream ...

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 ...

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? ...

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 ...

More Than Half of Consumers Blame the Brand for App and Website Issues

From broadcast blackouts sending college football fans into a frenzy to pre-sale concert ticket site outages causing widespread hysteria, the inability to get things done in the event of an app or website glitch is taking an emotional toll on consumers in the United States.

In the 2023 Online Reliability Report sponsored by Chronosphere, Gone in a Glitch, 94% of respondents say apps and websites are less reliable today than one year ago, leaving many feeling frustrated (71%), annoyed (65%) and even angry (26%).


Source: Chronosphere

"We live in an age of instant gratification. Regardless of the industry, customers will eventually switch to a competitor if they encounter too many app or website problems," said Martin Mao, CEO and Founder, Chronosphere. "This survey shows that the writing is on the wall. Americans will eventually ditch glitchy or slow apps and websites. The reputation of your brand ultimately lies in the reliability and availability of your digital infrastructure."

Report findings include:

■ 25% of respondents switch to a competitor when an app or website is slow or less reliable than usual.

■ On average, respondents tolerate less than four instances of unreliability before they switch to a competitor or stop using the app.

■ When having problems with an app or website, more than half (58%) blame the brand itself, more than other factors like the Internet provider or hardware.

■ 61% of respondents say they experience unreliable apps or websites once a week with Gen Z (25%) reporting experiencing glitches daily.

■ 95% of consumers report adverse emotions when a digital platform doesn't deliver as anticipated.

■ 1 in 4 members of Gen Z (25%) have cried at least once when an app or website went down.

■ One-third of all respondents say online disruptions are more frustrating than being stuck in traffic or bad weather ruining their plans.

■ 13% feel they are outright owed something from an app or website during an outage, and 16% for Gen Z and Millennials.

Methodology: The survey, prepared by Method Research and distributed by Dynata, involved 2,000 American consumers ages 18+ that spend 3 or more hours a day online, and collected from May 25 to May 31, 2023.

Mao continues, "For any business, nurturing customer relationships is key. Customers need apps they can count on, and if their expectations aren't met, your brand will get left behind."

Hot Topics

The Latest

Performance bottlenecks aren't uncommon when it comes to rolling out new technology, regardless of how capable or game-changing that technology might be. Every generation of new tech has encountered roadblocks that had to be overcome before it was truly able to shine. Virtualization forced organizations to rethink resource allocation, cloud transformation had us shift our focus toward scalability and elasticity, and microservices introduced entirely new challenges around observability and distributed systems. There's something different about AI, however ...

Consider a single order represented across order-management, execution, and settlement systems. Each database, message broker, and application may be online and processing its own records correctly. Yet the workflow has failed if related events arrive on different clocks, rely on inconsistent state, or cannot be reconciled before an operational decision must be made ...

AI now exists in almost every IT workflow. In a recent survey of more than 800 IT service professionals, all respondents indicated the use of AI in some form within their organization. But there's a growing paradox: if dashboards are clearing faster and alerts are resolved at unprecedented speed, why aren't IT service desks reporting lighter workloads? The research found that 71% of IT teams said their actual workload has remained flat or increased since adopting AI. This reality appears to contradict what we’ve been told about AI ...

Two years ago, almost every customer conversation about AI started with the same questions: Which model should we use? What can it do? Is it ready for the enterprise? Today, those discussions have moved on. CIOs are far more interested in how to govern AI, integrate it with existing systems, prepare their workforce and make it part of everyday operations. The challenge is no longer to prove that AI can deliver value. It's instead about how to embed AI into the business in a way that's secure, scalable and delivers measurable outcomes ...

Two things happened to production incidents between 2023 and now, and they did not happen at the same speed. The first is that a class of dependency that barely existed three years ago now accounts for one incident in ten. Incidents disclosed by AI model and AI application providers rose from 1.7% of all disclosed unplanned incidents in 2023 to 10.7% in 2026 year to date, roughly a sixfold rise; that counts only incidents at AI companies themselves, so the true share is higher. The second is that the time to close an incident has not come down ...

When an AI assistant gives an incomplete or incorrect answer, teams often blame the model. They adjust prompts, switch models, increase context windows or test a new retrieval strategy. However the model may not be a problem. In many enterprise AI workflows, the problem begins inside the document-ingestion pipeline ...

If you talk to any security or observability teams right now, they're all fighting the same fire: their tooling was built to ingest X, but their sources are pumping Y and soon to be doing Z. The knee-jerk reaction is always the same: we need more platform. However, this reaction is wrong. Let me explain why, because the solution to this problem is foundational, not financial. Instead of hurling yet more money at the problem, make sure you've done what's needed upstream ...

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 ...

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? ...

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 ...