By Priya Lakshminarayanan
It has been a year of disruption—and not in the way the tech world likes. Not disruption from innovation, but disruption from cyberattacks, overloaded servers, and unprecedented demand on tech stacks. Whether it was last summer’s CrowdStrike outage which wiped out approximately $10bn in value worldwide, the more recent Marks and Spencers ransomware, or the monthly failures of banking apps, this appears to be a perennial problem.
While some consumers might be quite sympathetic to a minor service outage, repeated and prolonged failures in service provisioning and availability do long-lasting damage to brand loyalty, reputation, and crucially, revenue. According to our research 37% of customers stopped using a service or subscription due to poor performance in 2024, meaning a potentially catastrophic threat to revenue can be one event away.
Prediction is the first step to prevention
Many industries are able to predict when major strain may be placed on their systems. Travel companies expect peaks during summer holidays, and for retail, there are major rushes during shopping events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. But many peak moments are also actively orchestrated by successful business strategy. Streamers and broadcasters can expect a clear uptick in viewership during major sporting events and cultural moments. Prediction is the first step to prevention.
In November of last year, Jake Paul and Mike Tyson’s fight became the most streamed sporting event in history when it aired live on Netflix. Thousands of viewers, however, reported issues with the stream including poor video quality, stuttering, and repeated crashing. These issues were caused by a massive surge in concurrent viewers that pushed Netflix’s streaming infrastructure to its limits. 45% of customers say they’d likely switch to a competitor if they experienced service disruptions during critical moments like thisAI-powered analytics can forecast such demand spikes with reasonable precision, allowing platforms to proactively allocate resources and prevent performance issues in real time. Though, in Netflix’s case, the immense marketing campaign and hype around the fight created a perfect storm of viewership that surpassed even optimistic forecasts.
Payment is a service
When it comes to service provision, we often consider only the end product, but the initial financial transaction is a major part of the experience. A bad payment experience is not just frustrating, it can be a deeply stressful experience for consumers. By trusting a business with their card details, customers are putting their financial life in your hands, and they are right to be cautious.
Small glitches during the payment process, or issues with transaction success can lead to serious frustration and mistrust, particularly if the declines result in retries at a different point in time. When consumers carefully manage their cash flow, any unbudgeted changes to their accounts can diminish their sense of control and cause anxiety.Payment failure during peak periods was cited by 18% of consumers as the most frustrating aspect of service failure.
Recover and reassure
Sometimes, however, despite the best intentions, things go wrong. It’s an inevitability, so preparation for outages is essential.
Recovery with speed, particularly at major moments of usage, is the best way to maintain reputation. But beyond this, transparency is necessary to keep users on board. Communicating directly with your customers about failures in service can feel like an admission of responsibility, but leaving them in the dark is much worse. Live tracking of service status on your own platform also allows you to better control the narrative around your outage, rather than depending on news or social media to convey the news.
A strong example of loyalty-retaining strategy in the face of outages was delivered by PlayStation earlier this year. After a multi-hour service failure to their online games platform, PlayStation immediately gifted an additional five days of service for free to all users. No excuses, no complaints, just a strong and meaningful apology and easy compensation.
Provide more, disrupt less
Embedding resilience into your tech stack is a fundamental requirement for businesses both small and large, throughout the entirety of the service lifecycle from payment to delivery. Consumers are spoiled for choice in today’s world, with goods and services increasingly available and affordable. Avoiding service outage and disruption, and fixing it quickly when it occurs, keeps customers loyal and brand reputation strong.
