No, this isn’t physics news; hold that Nobel Prize. This is about downtime; the dark matter of the web. It’s invisible to most of us, but its gravity has huge effects on commerce, companies, and markets. For everybody who does business online, unplanned website or service outages drag down their revenue, drag down their profits, and drag down their brand.

Uptime.com has been ranked #1 in Customer Support, and has been voted Most Likely to Recommend by the G2 Crowd Community. These terrific achievements cap off a year of activity and updates that have helped Uptime.com remain a market leader in IT alerting and web monitoring solutions. With top scores in IT Alerting and Web Monitoring, Uptime.com continues to grow alongside our userbase to create the most powerful and accessible web monitoring platform.

Scaling sort of sneaks up on you, doesn’t it? One day, you’re carefree, the next you start to notice something is off… Maybe it’s the crashing, or the frequent dips in performance. Could it be the new hire? It’s not DNS. Is it DNS? Scaling is a natural part of the business process, and your infrastructure will start to change completely as your userbase doubles and triples.

It’s 3 AM and you are roused out of sleep by the dull buzzing of your phone in the other room. Some sort of emergency, you conclude as you fumble with the lockscreen. There it is: an alert that the API governing user registration is acting up. When we think about the lag between time of incident and time to respond, it’s not just about how long the system went down. How long it physically takes us to respond to the problem also contributes to lost downtime.

Can you be incompetent and still stay in business? Not as far as your web infrastructure is concerned. All the studies show that when a website is unavailable, or even just slow to load, customers go elsewhere—and often they don’t come back. After all, if you can’t keep a website up and running, why should people trust you to deliver any other product or service? So it’s worth asking: how reliable is your website relative to the top brands in your industry?

We will always remember April 2020 as the month that a DDoS attack took the world’s most expensive bottle of whiskey offline. We barely knew ye. Dateline: April 2020, the world’s most expensive whiskey auction is taken offline by DDoS. But other notable outages taught us a lot about which threats dominate our landscape. Namely DDoS attacks, which are highlighting vulnerabilities organizations have with redundancy and threat mitigation.

One of the central questions we ponder in our work is: what does uptime mean in an interconnected world? You can do everything to ensure 100% reliability, yet still fail. How is this possible in an interconnected world? Shouldn’t there be enough redundancy to ensure nothing breaks if you don’t actively break it? That’s another way of saying technology is great when it works.

An old adage about choosing a hosting provider says that everyone promises 99.9% uptime so you need to test uptime of a site for the real picture. Or scour the forums for reviews and judge for yourself how reliable they are. That works too. What that saying is really getting at is the need for some kind of indicator that uptime does not fall below expectations, because you can’t just trust the word of the provider when your business is at stake.

It’s pretty safe to say that March was the month where everything changed for most of us. By now, enough has been said on coronavirus and we need not add to the pile. Our concern remains continuous uptime, and reporting on outages as teachable moments. During this time of heightened tensions, let’s take a few moments to do some post mortem work and see what we can learn from March’s outages.

Unplanned downtime can drive significant losses in the form of unrealized revenue. Teams may be caught off guard, or may face an outage outside their control, extending downtime hours unnecessarily. Without automated monitoring and alerting, teams face undetected outages that silently threaten SLA fulfillment. The recommendations in this report are best used as a guide on what trends may drive Site Reliability Engineering in the near term.