Software resilience testing is more critical than ever |
When internet services platform Cloudflare suffered an outage in November, it took a big chunk of the online world down with it.
Major platforms like ChatGPT, X, and Canva became unreachable. So did digital services offered by countless banks, retailers, and many other businesses. During the six-hour meltdown, as many as 2.4 billion users could have felt the impact.
Software outages like this have always been and always will be part of online life. But today our systems are more interconnected than ever, so a single failure can ripple outward. AI only amplifies that risk.
Yet, too many companies still lack protection against such disasters. In an era when outages are inevitable, they’re effectively operating without a safety net.
The fundamental missing ingredient is something simple but easily overlooked: resilience testing.
In a nutshell, resilience testing is all about pressure testing your software, before issues happen. It ensures that systems keep working—or quickly bounce back—when things go wrong.
Think of resilience testing as a small safety step to prevent big problems. The annual median cost of a high-impact IT outage is about $76 million. Businesses can also suffer reputational damage, lose customers, and get hit with regulatory penalties. Cloudflare is only one recent example. In the past year alone,