As the world gears up for the Paris Olympics, it’s not just athletes who need to be in peak condition. This Olympics comes hot on the heels of the largest IT outage in history. Recovery efforts from the CrowdStrike outage are still ongoing. Lessons will be learned, no doubt, but at least one takeaway is already evident: the modern web is an oh-so-fragile thing; neglect digital resilience at your peril.

“You can’t start a fire without a spark,” so sings The Boss. You can’t run an organization these days without digital dependencies. Nor – or perhaps because of this - can we outrun digital failure.

As we write, on Friday July 19th, a massive global cyber outage is continuing to take down critical services around the world dependent on Microsoft-based computers.

This is a guest blog written by the Chinafy Team. Most people in the website space would have heard of the term Great Firewall of China. What those people won’t really know, though, is what that means. For context, most websites don’t work the same way in China that they do elsewhere. Due to the way the China internet is designed, most websites take a long time to load and fail to function properly.

WebPageTest has long been the trusted choice for performance experts and top online retailers worldwide to enhance website speed, SEO rankings, user experience, and conversion rates. It provides in-depth diagnostic information on a page's performance, offering actionable insights to measure performance across all major browsers, device types, and network conditions.

We’re delighted to introduce a new, free tool for everyone: Catchpoint’s Live Internet Outage Map. The Live Internet Outage Map is a limited, free version of Catchpoint’s Internet Sonar capability publicly available to everyone, not just Catchpoint users. It shows outages from the last 24 hours and provides a sample of the thousands of services monitored in the full version of Internet Sonar.

Effective March 12, 2024, Google replaced the First Input Delay (FID) metric with Interaction to Next Paint (INP) as a part of its Core Web Vitals. This change marks a significant shift in how web interactivity is measured, reflecting a more comprehensive view of user experience. This blog explores INP, strategies for optimization, and asks if FID is still a valuable metric.

Imagine: Your executive team spent the last year developing messaging. Your design team worked for weeks on a compelling awareness campaign. Then, your marketing team deployed the perfect lead generation campaign. Your new customer, ready to make a purchase, eagerly clicks on your website link... only to be met with a frustratingly slow loading page.

Ensuring Internet Resilience in today’s digital economy has become not just an IT goal, but a business imperative. Companies are experiencing losses of over $1M a month due to outages and service degradations. Hidden secondary costs include resources dedicated to troubleshooting, payouts to customers, and longer-term impact on company reputation.