"What the recent failures from Internet giants demonstrate is that the question of the next outage is not if, but when," says Dritan Suljoti, Chief Product and Technology Officer of Catchpoint, referencing the company's new white paper, Preventing Outages in 2023: What We Learned from Recent Failures. "Moreover, the downstream effect of major outages to essential Internet infrastructure, such as cloud platforms, CDNs or DNS providers, means that no company is immune, no matter how well prepared they think they are. The white paper demonstrates why it's so important for all of us to be proactive to reduce Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) when the next outage occurs."

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Key lessons from the past

■ Develop an Internet Performance Monitoring strategy that allows you to monitor precisely what customers, workforce, and other users expect and build an Experience Score.

■ Monitor not only what is under your direct control, map your Internet stack to ensure you are monitoring every component of the Internet Stack relied on to deliver your content (including DNS, CDN, ISP, BGP, TCP configuration, SSL, and other cloud services, etc.).

■ Automate intelligently – design and test automation to ensure there are no bugs hiding in the code.

■ Be prepared to take fast action to remediate outages as they occur, for example, switching to a backup solution or dropping the third-party causing the issue. Develop runbooks and practice recovery.

■ Whenever change is scheduled, ensure your team is ready for any outages that may occur (intentionally or not) with a crisis call plan that includes a communication plan and templates, a plan to mitigate failures from third-parties, and a best practices monitoring and observability plan.
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"Given the impact of serious outages to the bottom line, not to mention the long-tail impact to brand and reputation, amidst a landscape of increased Internet reliance alongside ever-growing Internet fragility and greater and great complexity, the need for community learnings from past failures to be shared and practical advice disseminated around stemming future major incidents and ensuring Internet Resilience is imperative," says Gerardo Dada, CMO at Catchpoint. "We believe this white paper offers an invaluable deep dive into recent outages past and key lessons learned that all of us can learn from to prevent (or mitigate the consequences of) the next major outage."