Every minute dropped at a critical moment can cost thousands of euros. How do companies know that their application will last?

Black Friday.
The sale of tickets for a concert.
The closing of an NFT drop.
The opening of university enrollment.
The launch of a new product line in ecommerce.

All these moments have something in common: their critical nature is not so much in the annual volume they generate, but in the fact that They do not allow failure or recovery.

If a website fails at that moment, the impact cannot be compensated for later.
The order that was not placed at 00:01 on Black Friday is not recovered when the system returns: that customer, in many cases, has already made another decision.

The cost of downtime is around $5,600 per minute according to Gartner, and in companies with high digital dependence it can scale up to $9,000—$15,000 per minute.

At times of high demand, that impact can be significantly greater.
During Black Friday, for example, checkout traffic increases by around 24%, which amplifies any failure.

The question that many companies don't ask themselves well in advance is:

How do we know that the application will last at that time?

Three types of critical moments

1. The unrepeatable moment

(ticketing, NFT drops, live events)

A failure to sell tickets not only implies immediate loss, but also an impact on user confidence.

In contexts where the event is not repeated, the margin of error is practically non-existent.
In addition, the reaction on social networks can quickly amplify the problem.

2. The moment of high concentration

(Black Friday, launches, campaigns)

Many companies concentrate a significant part of their turnover in very specific windows.

In these cases:

• mistakes have a greater impact
• Abandonment increases significantly
• and investment in acquisition (ads, influencers, etc.) can be lost if the platform doesn't respond

3. Constant criticism

(fintech, SaaS, healthcare)

In some products, the critical moment is not one-off: it's continuous.

Payment applications, SaaS tools or health platforms operate with a constant dependence.
Any failure can directly affect the customer's operations or sensitive data.

The underlying problem

The most common mistake is not not to test, but to do so under conditions that do not reflect reality.

An application can work properly in staging
and behave differently in production:

• with more concurrent users
• on other devices
• in unsupported browsers
• or under real load conditions

More than half of organizations recognize that their validation process does not cover all of these scenarios.

The Real Difference

Automation doesn't eliminate risk, but it does change the moment you detect it.

It's not about avoiding every glitch, it's about discovering them before users do.

The question isn't whether an application can crash.
It can.

The question is:
Are you going to discover it first or your users?

And if you find out first,
Do you have room to react before the critical moment has passed?

References

1. Gartner/ Atlassian. (2024). Calculating the cost of downtime. https://www.atlassian.com/incident-management/kpis/cost-of-downtime — The average cost of downtime according to Gartner is around $5,600 per minute (reference from 2014, revised upwards in subsequent studies). For midsize companies with digital models, Atlas estimates around $9,000 per minute. For small businesses, between $137 and $427 per minute. The figure varies significantly depending on the sector and the degree of dependence on the digital channel.

2. Erwood Group/Gartner. (2025). The True Costs of Downtime in 2025. https://www.erwoodgroup.com/blog/the-true-costs-of-downtime-in-2025-a-deep-dive-by-business-size-and-industry/ — Gartner (2024) estimates that medium-sized retail e-commerce companies lose between $200,000 and $500,000 per hour of downtime. E-commerce with a high digital-native component face proportionately higher costs due to their greater dependence on the online channel.

3. Kinsta. (2025). How much revenue could downtime cost you on Black Friday? https://kinsta.com/blog/black-friday-website-downtime/ — Kinsta's own data for 2024 confirms that Black Friday checkout activity grew 24.1% compared to normal weeks, and Cyber Monday traffic increased 42%. During that period, the cost per minute of fall is exponentially higher than a normal Tuesday. The cost of downtime isn't limited to direct revenue: it includes wasted advertising spend, additional support, and reputational damage.

4. SiteQuality. (2025). The True Cost of Website Downtime in 2025. https://siteqwality.com/blog/true-cost-website-downtime-2025/ — Global 2000 e-commerce loses an average of $287 million per year due to downtime, 43.5% above the industrial average. Around 77% of consumers leave an online retailer after finding errors. For mid-market companies with a high dependence on the digital channel, the cost per minute of falling during traffic peaks far exceeds the average annualized figures.

5. Capgemini/ OpenText. (2024). World Quality Report 2024-25. Capgemini & Sogeti. https://www.capgemini.com/insights/research-library/world-quality-report-2024-25/ — 56% of organizations consider their quality engineering process to be underautomated, slowing down development cycles and reducing efficiency. 68% of organizations use generative AI in their QA processes in 2024. The adoption of testautomation has grown to around 44% as companies adopt cloud-native technologies.

6. Tricentis. (2024). Fail Watch 2024 software. Tricentis Research. https://www.tricentis.com/resources/software-fail-watch-annual-report — Tricentis annually documents the financial impact of software failures on listed companies. Failures at critical times — launches, peaks in demand, events with a fixed date — have a disproportionate impact on market value and customer confidence. In sectors with highly critical temporary events (ticketing, ecommerce, fintech), the failure at the right time is irreversible: the event is not repeated.

7. ITIC. (2024). 2024 Hourly Cost of Downtime Survey. Information TechnologyIntelligence Consulting. https://itic-corp.com/blog/2024/04/2024-hourly-cost-of-downtime-survey/ — In the ITIC 2024 survey, more than 90% of respondents estimated that the cost of an hour of downtime exceeds $300,000. Around 44% of organizations estimate this cost to be over one million dollars per hour. For small and medium-sized companies with up to 200 employees, that estimate remained similar to that of large companies.

‍