It’s a digital world—we just work and play in it...Unless, of course, you work in the IT group responsible for digital experience. Then you also have nightmares in it. Here’s why.

Outages on the Internet always catch you by surprise, whether you are the end user or the Head of SRE or DevOps trying to keep a clear mind while you execute your incident playbook. As people in charge of ensuring reliable services for our customers, our normal experience of outages involves surfing a deluge of fire alarms and video calls as we work to solve the problem as quickly as we can. We often forget, therefore, what an outage means to the end user.

Last month, we partnered with AWS to put together a webinar on the importance of implementing a comprehensive redundant networking and multi-CDN monitoring strategy. You can replay the event in full here. In this article, we’ll recap the key takeaways covered by the panel of experts who included Leo Vasiliou, Director of Product Marketing at Catchpoint, and Steve Campbell, our Chief Strategy Officer.

The rolling Comcast outage on Monday, November 8th and Tuesday, November 9th affected customers across the U.S., knocking users offline around the country. The first wave took place Monday evening in the San Francisco Bay area. The second, which had a wider geographic impact, occurred Tuesday morning, primarily affecting broad swathes of the Midwest, Southeast, and East Coast.

Seasonal spikes in consumer activity are expected, if not depended on, by online retailers throughout the calendar year. However, as shoppers rush to compete over door-buster deals and order holiday must-haves, web traffic escalates to levels standard resource allocation cannot easily sustain. This spike in traffic can lead to unresponsive checkouts, lost or abandoned carts, and slow-loading pages, ultimately resulting in thousands of dollars in lost revenue.