The race to zero downtime is on – and AI is leading it

AI-powered self-healing infrastructure is redefining reliability

Opinion By Anish Agrawal, Suhaib Zaheer published 13 December 2025

(Image credit: Shutterstock / LookerStudio)

It’s the moment every online business dreads. Pages freeze, payments stall, and seconds later, the site goes dark. In those brief minutes, sales evaporate, customers move on, and trust begins to erode.

Research estimates that technology-related downtime costs companies around $400 billion a year, with the average cost to UK businesses exceeding £4,300 per minute. Those numbers tell a simple story – in today’s digital economy, reliability has become as valuable as revenue itself.

When uptime is your brand, you can’t afford uncertainty. Reliability is no longer a background function; it’s the frontline of the customer experience.

Suhaib Zaheer & Anish Agrawal

Suhaib Zaheer, SVP - Digital Ocean and General Manager - Cloudways, and Anish Agrawal, CEO & Co-Founder, Traversal

That urgency is driving a quiet transformation in how businesses approach their IT infrastructure.

The technology systems powering our world are becoming too complex for humans alone to manage, and the traditional ways of monitoring reliability can no longer keep up.

We’ve reached a new inflection point. One where prediction must replace reaction, and where artificial intelligence (AI) is redefining what it means to stay online.

Why reliability needs rethinking

In the early days of the internet, outages were often straightforward: a single server failed, and a technician fixed it. Today, even the smallest website might depend on a web of interconnected components – load balancers, databases, caching systems, content delivery networks, and countless third-party plug-ins.

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