Fast and furious: The importance of performance in the digital age

As someone who's been in the tech space for years, I've seen the evolution of user expectations and the way businesses have adapted to the digital world. What strikes me most today is how fast things have to move. I remember a time when uptime alone was the key to a successful service. Today, it’s no longer enough for a service to just be “up”—it needs to be fast, seamless, and reliable at all times.

In the early days, slow performance was considered just an inconvenience. We’d deal with it, tweak something, and carry on. But now? Slow performance is seen as a service failure in its own right – just as damaging, if not more so, than a complete outage. And this isn’t just a feeling anymore. The SRE Report 2025 has officially validated this shift in mindset, highlighting that poor performance is now viewed as equally harmful as downtime.

This brings us to a key question: how should businesses respond to this new reality? Let’s look at some of the survey findings that reveal just how widespread this shift is and what it means for your company.  

Why the shift to performance?

According to the SRE Report, 53% of organizations agree with the statement, “Slow is the new down.” The implications for the wider industry are clear: reliability is no longer just about uptime; it’s about delivering consistently fast experiences.

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Really, this should come as no surprise. As consumers, few of us are willing to tolerate slow performance online. We won’t wait through buffering videos, slow apps, or websites that take forever to load. But as businesses move toward digital-first solutions, they must recognize that this impatience is not just a minor inconvenience—it’s a serious risk to their bottom line.

Here are some key reasons why the impact of sluggish service can be just as detrimental as a complete outage:

1. User Frustration: Slow performance leads to user frustration. Research shows that 40% of users abandon a site that takes over three seconds to load—and that goes up to 53% if they’re browsing on a mobile device. As page load time goes from one to ten seconds, the probability of a mobile user bouncing increases by 123%. Inevitably, that leads to the next negative impact on this list.  

2. Lost Revenue: For e-commerce platforms, even a slight delay in page load time can have significant financial repercussions. A study revealed that even a one-second delay in page load time can cause a 7% reduction in conversions.

3. Brand Reputation: 79% of online shoppers who experience a dissatisfying visit are less likely to buy from the same site again. Users may voice their frustration on social media or review sites, influencing potential customers and deterring them from engaging with the brand.  

4. Operational Costs: Slow performance doesn’t only affect customers—it increases operational costs. 86% of businesses say an hour of downtime costs $300,000 or more. 44% of firms report downtime costs exceeding $1 million per hour. Customer support teams may receive more complaints, leading to additional staffing and resources required to resolve issues.

Case study: The real-world impact of slow performance  

If there is one incident that encapsulates the potential impact of frustrating user experience, it’s Amazon’s 2022 two-day search issue. The errors lasted for 22 hours, remaining intermittent, yet continuing to impact users worldwide wishing to search for products on Amazon’s desktop and mobile sites. According to our Synthetic data, around 20% of worldwide users were affected during the entire time frame.

For some users, Amazon’s search function was completely down and unusable for the entire 22 hours. End users were greeted with an error message when trying to search for items. Can you imagine the loss of revenue Amazon incurred because of this incident—an issue that impacted one-fifth of Amazon’s global users?

What’s critical here is that this wasn’t a full-blown outage. The service wasn’t entirely down, but the performance degradation still had a profound effect on Amazon’s business. This is a clear example of why tracking performance is essential, even when a service isn't completely unavailable.  

Why track SLOs and XLOs?

Since it’s now accepted by the SRE community that slow performance is just as damaging as downtime, organizations must be proactive in ensuring that their services meet the high expectations of users. According to the report, 44% believe performance should be tracked against a Service Level Objective (SLO), and 35% say it should be measured as an indicator of overall system health.

SLOs and Experience Level Objectives (XLOs) aren’t just buzzwords; they're guiding principles for ensuring performance indicators align with real customer expectations.  

40% of businesses are prioritizing the adoption of SLOs and XLOs over the next 12 months. Tracking these performance indicators isn’t just about measuring uptime anymore; it's about ensuring that your service meets the evolving expectations of users in real-time. This is where burn-down charts come into play. Burn down charts help track the progress of your performance against your set objectives, showing how much of your performance budget is left as time goes on.  

When performance starts to dip, these charts help you spot it early, allowing for corrective actions before it impacts users. In this way, burn down charts offer a clear picture of service health.

Address slow performance with Internet Performance Monitoring

Amazon’s performance degradation issue mentioned earlier could have been resolved far more quickly with an Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) solution. Incidentally, Catchpoint’s IPM platform was able to identify precisely which layer of the Internet stack was responsible for the issue in real time.  

With IPM, organizations gain visibility into the entire Internet Stack, allowing them to detect issues early, pinpoint their root causes, and resolve them before they negatively impact users.  

Here are some ways IPM can help:

1. Proactive Monitoring: Monitor digital infrastructure in real-time to find and fix issues before they escalate, ensuring seamless performance.

2. Root Cause Analysis: Quickly identify the source of problems, such as DNS misconfigurations or network congestion, for faster resolution.

3. Performance Optimization: Optimize infrastructure by analyzing performance data and recommending improvements to enhance speed and reliability.

4. User Experience Monitoring: Measure the performance of digital services from the end-user's perspective, helping organizations identify and address performance bottlenecks that could impact user satisfaction.

5. Incident Management: Automatically trigger alerts and incident tickets to ensure swift action and minimize downtime.

6. SLO/XLO Monitoring: Track SLOs and XLOs to ensure performance aligns with user expectations and organizational goals

Getting Started with AppAssure

Organizations can leverage AppAssure, a comprehensive IPM quick start package, to tackle the challenge of slow performance and micro-outages. Here's how to get started:

1. Assess Your Current State: Evaluate your existing monitoring and observability practices to identify gaps and areas for improvement.

2. Define Objectives and Key Results (OKRs): Clearly communicate your performance objectives and align team efforts with business goals.

3. Implement AppAssure: Deploy AppAssure to monitor and optimize performance for a key application or service.  Use its advanced analytics to gain actionable insights.

4. Invest in Training: Provide technical training to your teams to ensure they can fully leverage AppAssure and other new technologies.

5. Foster a Culture of Resilience: Promote transparency and collaboration within your organization to address performance challenges and improve reliability.

By following these steps, you can harness the power of IPM to achieve greater reliability, resilience, and customer satisfaction. Remember, in today's world, slow is the new down, and with the right tools and practices in place, you can ensure your services are always performing at their best.

Download The SRE Report 2025 or read it online (no registration required).

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