Website Downtime – A Setback to Business Reputation

Website breakdowns are not just annoyance, but can become publicity nightmares for businesses. Even well-known companies like Amazon, Twitter, Yahoo, CNN and many other internet giants had suffered downtime issues over the past years. Sometimes, these outages can do more harm than just causing losses in revenues and sales profits. For instance, in September 2010, when Virgin Blue's website was down due to account of hardware failure, it not only affected the company's profits in millions of dollars but caused inconvenience to thousands of passengers interrupting their travel for more than a week. A similar incident has happened last year in August 2016, with the world's second largest airlines. Delta Airlines had a disrupted functionality in several of their applications including their website due to power outage at its Atlanta hub. With this incident, the airline company incurred millions of dollars in lost revenue and had a damage to its hard earned reputation as reliable international carrier.

Impact on Customer Expectations

Companies that serve customers through their websites, experience major impact when disruption happen to their site functionality. The effect is not particular to e-commerce sites alone as with the other websites the potential customer grows frustrated when their expectations with the site serving are not met. When Amazon had an outage issue in 2013, it instantly spurred conversations and doubts about the reliability of its AWS web services. The question of confidence is quite natural, when thousands of customers are dependent on the website for seeking particular service from the company and service interruption happens to the key transactions. 

Spreads Negative Publicity About the Brand

When websites experience downtime or performance issues, it can have serious repercussions, other than financial losses. There is a possibility that the dissatisfied customers can bring out their frustrations on social media and through word of mouth. This can make things worse for businesses, because their inability to serve customer needs can spread negative publicity about their brand. Just a couple such outage incidents is enough to erode the reputation of the company, because the customers mostly associate the website with frequent downtime issues.

Opt For Solutions that Reduce the Risk of Downtime

Companies that largely depend on websites for their business, should have site's uptime on top of their list. Since the reasons for downtime are not predictable beforehand, they should opt for solutions like website monitoring service to monitor their uptime statistics. Besides, it is important to choose the monitoring service that supports comprehensive features including uptime monitoring to check the issues associated with site performance. If any discrepancy in site functionality is identified, it will be notified before the site experiences actual downtime. Since website monitoring is prompt in detecting and alerting the site issues, the service is efficient in reducing the risks associated with website failures.