Navigating the new normal Operational resilience in the cloud
On July 19, 2024, a global IT outage brought business to a standstill. Thousands of flights were canceled or delayed, hospitals postponed non-essential care, financial transactions failed to process, and federal agencies shuttered.1 Throughout the day and the week that followed, customer service teams at affected companies scrambled to address the mounting number of customer complaints while keeping stakeholders informed. The root cause of the massive disruption was traced to a faulty software update. This incident highlighted a critical reality: IT disruptions are not merely technical issues but business crises that directly impact brand reputation, customer trust, and revenue. The challenge for customer service leaders is clear. They must maintain service standards while safeguarding customer experiences during IT disruptions. This ebook provides these leaders with practical guidance for understanding key challenges, protecting team bandwidth, anticipating and preparing for outages before the strike, and collaborating
more effectively with technical teams to address incidents efficiently to maintain customer confidence.
By implementing these strategies, customer service and support leaders can build operational resilience to minimize the negative impacts IT outages have on customer experiences and business operations.
Enterprises face unprecedented complexity in managing digital infrastructure across interconnected cloud architectures. While artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed these systems to process massive volumes of data and scale service delivery, it has also created new vulnerabilities that allow disruptions to ripple across the enterprise. Companies must adapt their resilience strategies to match this new reality.
In PagerDuty’s 2025 State of Digital Operations report, research with over 1,100 operational leaders demonstrated the impact of this transformation: 37% of respondents reported increased operational efficiency from AI implementation, while 36% cited improved customer experiences.1 Moreover, 53% of CIOs and CTOs expect agentic AI to be core to their digital operations within the next two years.