Dubbed 'the most important election ever,' it was expected that online traffic would skyrocket across traditional broadcasters, online streaming platforms, and digital publishers on November 5, 2024. As the initial results rolled in, Internet traffic surged nationwide by up to 15%, both at national and state levels. Surprisingly, though, this surge in traffic didn’t happen where you might expect—not on TV.

Every week, we hear about critical applications failing, leaving users frustrated and businesses scrambling. IT teams are fighting too many fires, dealing with too many disruptions, and spending too much time guessing instead of fixing. A 2023 study by Forrester Consulting found that in the month before the study, 37% of companies estimated they lost between $100,000-$499,000, and 39% lost $500,000-$999,999 due to internet disruptions. The costs are real, and they’re massive.

The CrowdStrike outage was a reminder of how quickly the dominoes can fall—especially when the foundation is shaky. Delta Airlines was hit harder than its competitors. While United and American Airlines were able to recover within days, Delta faced ongoing struggles, leading to the cancellation of 7,000 flights over five days.

Last month, web performance experts from leading brands joined an exclusive session with the Catchpoint product team to explore new features and future enhancements in WebPageTest and Catchpoint Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM). This post shares highlights from that session.

Organizations are seeing measurable benefits from investing in observability, including faster issue resolution, cost reduction, and improved business outcomes. However, challenges still remain, including rising costs, tool fragmentation, and the need for more comprehensive monitoring of internet dependencies and user experience. Let’s explore these challenges and the best practices organizations are adopting to address them.

We're honored to announce that Catchpoint has been named a Leader in Gartner's first-ever Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM). We believe this recognition reflects the rapid pace of innovation of our Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) platform.