Digital Incidents in Retail Have Increased 37% Year-Over-Year

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically accelerated the shift from brick-and-mortar retail to ecommerce, leading to unprecedented levels of online demand and digital incidents for retailers. This surge placed immense pressure on ITOps and DevOps teams to maintain seamless digital services, as evidenced by a notable increase in incident counts reported by PagerDuty across North America and EMEA. As physical store shopping remains subdued, especially during the holiday season, retailers are increasingly reliant on robust digital operations to ensure service uptime and reliability. To manage the elevated demand, the adoption of a hypercare strategy, which involves planned support to maintain system performance during traffic surges, is crucial. Retailers are encouraged to equip their teams with advanced digital operations platforms to better handle the increased digital dependency and maintain consistent customer experiences.