Catchpoint has published results from a Forrester Consulting study highlighting the high cost of internet disruptions for e-commerce and digital-first businesses. The study found that companies with full Internet Stack monitoring experience 54% fewer disruption-related losses annually than those lacking complete visibility.
With today’s sky-high customer expectations and attention spans measured only milliseconds, digital experience is business—and outages, latency, or slow-loading pages are as good as being offline. According to the 2025 Forrester Opportunity Snapshot, the average company experiences 72 Internet disruptions per month. For 42% of the companies surveyed, those disruptions resulted in losses of over $500,000 in the month preceding the survey, adding up to over $6M annually.
A growing problem with real financial consequences
Disruptions—whether caused by latency, downtime, or third-party failures—are happening far more frequently than many leaders realize. 83% of respondents estimated their company lost over $100,000 per month due to Internet disruptions, or $1.2M annually.
More troubling still: 65% of respondents said if their web pages or apps are slow, they might as well be down. And the damage goes far beyond lost revenue—it’s about lost trust, lost productivity, and lost momentum.
But there is positive news. Losses of $1,000,000 or more are down by a third. Companies that monitor the entire Internet Stack report average losses 54% lower than those who haven’t implemented IPM.
Poor visibility is hurting businesses—and their people
The study found that 69% of respondents cited increased customer churn as the most common outcome of Internet disruptions, while 54% reported increased burnout among IT staff. Businesses are caught in a cycle of reactive firefighting—often using manual processes to identify and diagnose issues that originate outside their own environment.
Today’s retail experiences are not monolithic, but a collection of dozens of components distributed across datacenters, connected via APIs, and cloud services from advertising to CDNs to payment processing, each of them dependent on certificates, DNS, ISPs, routing, and many other technologies. A disruption in any of these components is often enough to impact the business in a material way – both in terms of lost revenue and a very real impact on trust and loyalty.
And yet, 100% of respondents said investing in IPM would have a positive business impact, with 80% describing the impact as significant or large, up from 75% just two years ago.
“Full-stack IPM is essential for digital resilience,” said Mehdi Daoudi, CEO and co-founder of Catchpoint. “If you can’t see what’s slowing your users down, you can’t fix it—and that’s money left on the table, customers lost, and teams burned out. $6M lost to Internet disruptions each year is $6M too much”
The Path Forward: Visibility, Resilience, and Continuous Improvement
Despite growing awareness, adoption of full-stack IPM remains limited. While most companies track some level of performance, only about one in three are monitoring as comprehensively as they should, and fewer still are succeeding. The result: millions in preventable losses, thousands of frustrated users, and teams stuck in the dark.
To ensure resilience, companies need tools that offer complete, real-time visibility into every layer of their digital delivery—from external DNS providers and APIs to cloud infrastructure as well as external and internal networks and applications. This visibility must extend to where customers actually are, capturing the real-world experience of a user from that location, and showing how the experience is enabled across the backbone and services across the Internet.
About the Study
This Opportunity Snapshot was commissioned by Catchpoint and conducted by Forrester Consulting in early 2025. To create this profile, Forrester surveyed 262 global decision-makers responsible for e-commerce strategy and technology across the retail, consumer goods, and manufacturing sectors. Respondents were based in North America (59%), Asia Pacific (21%), and Europe (20%), and represented organizations ranging from 1,000 to over 20,000 employees.
Join us for a live webinar on May 29th at 1pm EDT, where we will be discussing the eCommerce Snapshot with guest speaker, Forrester VP, Principal Analyst Sucharita Kodali.
To download the new Forrester Study: The Cost of Internet Disruption, visit the website here.
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