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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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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

A new wave of tariffs, some exceeding 100%, is sending shockwaves across the technology industry. Enterprises are grappling with sudden, dramatic cost increases that threaten to disrupt carefully planned budgets, sourcing strategies, and deployment plans. For CIOs and CTOs, this isn't just an economic setback; it's a wake-up call. The era of predictable cloud pricing and stable global supply chains is over ...

As artificial intelligence (AI) adoption gains momentum, network readiness is emerging as a critical success factor. AI workloads generate unpredictable bursts of traffic, demanding high-speed connectivity that is low latency and lossless. AI adoption will require upgrades and optimizations in data center networks and wide-area networks (WANs). This is prompting enterprise IT teams to rethink, re-architect, and upgrade their data center and WANs to support AI-driven operations ...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is core to observability practices, with some 41% of respondents reporting AI adoption as a core driver of observability, according to the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance report from New Relic ...

Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 15, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Do-It-Yourself Network Automation ... 

Zero-day vulnerabilities — security flaws that are exploited before developers even know they exist — pose one of the greatest risks to modern organizations. Recently, such vulnerabilities have been discovered in well-known VPN systems like Ivanti and Fortinet, highlighting just how outdated these legacy technologies have become in defending against fast-evolving cyber threats ... To protect digital assets and remote workers in today's environment, companies need more than patchwork solutions. They need architecture that is secure by design ...