Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In December 2025, an AI coding agent at AWS suddenly decided to delete and rebuild an entire production environment, causing a 13-hour service disruption and a PR headache for Amazon. As rapid adoption of AI leads to more high-profile, revenue-impacting incidents, resilience has moved from a technical concern to a board-level financial risk.

It’s 2:47 p.m. Your checkout service has been down for 11 minutes. Customers are screenshotting errors and calling in. Your CEO walks into your office and starts asking questions. In this moment, there are two kinds of IT leaders: Whether you walk out with more budget authority (and executive trust) or less depends on your answers, and the infrastructure that supports them. But preparation isn’t just about surviving the incident. It’s actually a revenue opportunity.

While most on-call schedules are built to represent regular rotations, often on a weekly basis, not all of your on-call needs require the same coverage every week. We’ve added Custom Shifts to the Shift-Based Schedules for maximum flexibility. Custom shifts are a feature of our new Shift-Based Schedules. With Custom Shifts, your team can cover ad hoc needs for special events, major deploys, Failure Fridays, gamedays, or whatever comes up that needs some extra coverage.

For most enterprises, ServiceNow has become the backbone of IT operations, the platform where workflows are governed, compliance is maintained, and every incident, change, and request is tracked from start to finish. If you’re running ServiceNow, you’ve made a serious investment in how your IT operates. PagerDuty is built to make that investment work even harder.

We recently updated our Schedules to better reflect how teams are currently managing their on-call responsibilities. Not everyone is working on weekly shifts or providing 24×7 coverage for all of their services, and that should be easy to schedule in our new tooling. To give you some examples, I’ve gone back through some of the questions we’ve gotten on the PagerDuty Commons over the past couple of years for questions about custom schedules that we weren’t really thinking about.