The Cost of Increasing Incidents: How COVID-19 Affected MTTR, MTTA, and More

During the accelerated digital transformation driven by the COVID-19 pandemic, companies faced an increase in critical incidents, rising by 19% between 2019 and 2020, with the Travel & Hospitality and Telecom industries experiencing the highest surge. Despite improvements in metrics like mean time to acknowledge (MTTA) and mean time to resolve (MTTR), the overall time spent on incident resolution has increased, impacting technical teams' workloads and contributing to burnout and attrition. The Great Resignation highlighted the need for organizations to address off-hour interruptions, which increased by 9%, affecting work-life balance and leading to higher attrition rates. Platforms like PagerDuty have helped improve operational maturity by reducing noise through event compression and alert grouping, allowing teams to focus on critical issues and mitigate burnout. As companies continue to rely heavily on digital operations, maintaining a healthy and efficient team while ensuring excellent customer service remains crucial.