Catchpoint recently issued The Internet Resilience Report 2025, its second report that looks at the impact of Internet outages and slow Internet performance on large corporations. Catchpoint sells software that looks in detail at Internet performance with the goal of identifying network problems early and fixing them before they become big problems.

The conclusions of the report will be familiar to anybody who works from home. Catchpoint highlights that broadband outages are costly and disruptive. But it also concludes that “slow is the new down”, meaning that broadband slowdowns are as damaging as outages. Web outages for specific platforms seem to be occurring with increasing frequency. I was recently working with a client who needed to interpret mapping data, and we found that ArcGIS was down nationwide. We had no alternative except to wait half a day until the application was up and running again.

The Catchpoint survey solicited feedback from 475 IT managers, directors, and executives of major companies. The key finding of the study is that 51% of the respondents said that an Internet performance problem led to a monthly loss of over $1 million in revenues in the last year, up from 43% in 2024. A third of those companies lost more than $10 million.

The most interesting finding is that 42% of respondents equated slow Internet performance to have the same negative impact as an outage. The report uses the phrase ”slow apps are dead apps” to describe the financial impact of applications that are not working as expected. The report also cites a recent study by Forrester that surveyed online retailers and reached the same conclusion that slow Internet might as well be an outage in terms of the bottom-line consequences.

The report concludes that large corporations should concentrate on application performance as much as they concentrate on Internet downtime. Big companies have largely accepted the need for broadband redundancy, and most buy a broadband connection from multiple ISPs. But that doesn’t protect them against regional and national outages of the companies and applications that control the Internet or the major applications used by businesses.

I expect that most readers of this blog are not from the giant corporations surveyed by Catchpoint. But I expect that everybody reading this has at least a few stories of how poor Internet performance impacted them in the last year. It seems like every month that something goes down for a while.

I’m lucky to live in a city, and when my broadband goes down, I am able to change quickly to using my cell phone for broadband. People living in rural areas are not so fortunate. At least around where I live, the cell coverage just a few miles outside the city isn’t good enough to support working from home.

The country is in the process of supposedly getting at least one broadband connection to everybody in rural America. But rural folks may still not feel secure to work from home if they don’t have a second broadband alternative. I hear from folks regularly who tell me about rural broadband outages that last for days, which contrasts with urban outages that rarely last more than a few hours. I’ve never thought about this before, but true rural parity between urban and rural broadband might mean having an alternative when primary broadband fails.