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Super Bowl Puts Websites to the Test

Beyonce.com Crash Highlights Importance of APM
Matt Jacobs

Just seconds after her Super Bowl performance (and subsequent tour teaser), Beyonce – arguably today’s most popular pop artist – found her website "slayed" by an onslaught of traffic and connection failures – causing heartbreak for pop fans everywhere.

This outage illustrates that even the biggest celebrities and brands can easily find their digital performance put to the test. Today’s mobile apps and sites are complex beasts, and we imagine that Beyonce’s site was timed to be updated just immediately after her Super Bowl show. When you combine our biggest sporting event with 114 million viewers (over 1/3 of the U.S. population), with news from our most popular performer, you have a glitch just waiting to happen. There’s such a large amount of code and so many interdependencies in play.

Because there are so many elements that go into an application’s performance -- the network, storage, databases and more -- you need a system to monitor all of these interactions seamlessly in one dashboard, and most importantly, instantaneously identify and resolve glitches. Application Performance Management (APM), which is already used today by big brands to address performance bottlenecks -- solves these issues at scale for fast-growing audiences. While it’s critical that companies prepare their application architecture to handle load surges (like what Beyonce’s site experienced) and fix chokepoints, it’s even more important that any issues found be resolved quickly to keep consumers and fans happy.

We bet Queen Bey’s fans will forgive her, but for companies, every minute of downtime means a site is losing money. In fact, an IDC study last year found that application downtime costs the Fortune 1000 anywhere from $1.25 billion to $2.5 billion every year -- and critical application failure costs anywhere from $500,000 to $1 million per hour. Consumers usually won’t tolerate even the shortest outage. As the lines between personal, digital and physical experiences continue to blur, brands – which includes entertainers – must ensure their apps function at all times across multiple platforms.

Matt Jacobs is VP of Brand, Digital & Demand at AppDynamics.

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Super Bowl Puts Websites to the Test

Beyonce.com Crash Highlights Importance of APM
Matt Jacobs

Just seconds after her Super Bowl performance (and subsequent tour teaser), Beyonce – arguably today’s most popular pop artist – found her website "slayed" by an onslaught of traffic and connection failures – causing heartbreak for pop fans everywhere.

This outage illustrates that even the biggest celebrities and brands can easily find their digital performance put to the test. Today’s mobile apps and sites are complex beasts, and we imagine that Beyonce’s site was timed to be updated just immediately after her Super Bowl show. When you combine our biggest sporting event with 114 million viewers (over 1/3 of the U.S. population), with news from our most popular performer, you have a glitch just waiting to happen. There’s such a large amount of code and so many interdependencies in play.

Because there are so many elements that go into an application’s performance -- the network, storage, databases and more -- you need a system to monitor all of these interactions seamlessly in one dashboard, and most importantly, instantaneously identify and resolve glitches. Application Performance Management (APM), which is already used today by big brands to address performance bottlenecks -- solves these issues at scale for fast-growing audiences. While it’s critical that companies prepare their application architecture to handle load surges (like what Beyonce’s site experienced) and fix chokepoints, it’s even more important that any issues found be resolved quickly to keep consumers and fans happy.

We bet Queen Bey’s fans will forgive her, but for companies, every minute of downtime means a site is losing money. In fact, an IDC study last year found that application downtime costs the Fortune 1000 anywhere from $1.25 billion to $2.5 billion every year -- and critical application failure costs anywhere from $500,000 to $1 million per hour. Consumers usually won’t tolerate even the shortest outage. As the lines between personal, digital and physical experiences continue to blur, brands – which includes entertainers – must ensure their apps function at all times across multiple platforms.

Matt Jacobs is VP of Brand, Digital & Demand at AppDynamics.

The Latest

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

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