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Most retailers have monitoring tools in place to alert them when something goes wrong. But what happens when your trusted monitoring solution fails to spot an issue immediately, turning minutes of downtime into thousands of dollars in lost revenue?
Customers were suddenly unable to access the retailer's website, effectively bringing online trading to a halt. Every minute the issue remained unresolved represented lost revenue, disrupted customer journeys and potential damage to brand trust.
What made the incident particularly challenging was that the ecommerce platform itself was operating normally. Core systems appeared healthy and there were no obvious signs of failure within the application.
Despite using a well-established monitoring solution, the issue was not immediately identified.
TCTG Monitoring, however, detected the outage within seconds and alerted our support teams. As the investigation began, it quickly became clear that the problem did not originate from the ecommerce platform at all. The retailer's DNS provider was experiencing a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, preventing customers from reaching the website despite the storefront remaining fully operational.
Our teams, operating across multiple time zones, immediately began investigating the incident, identifying the root cause and supporting the retailer's response.
The incident highlights an increasingly important challenge for ecommerce leaders. Modern customer experiences depend on a growing network of third-party services, integrations and infrastructure providers. When one of those dependencies fails, the commercial impact can be just as significant as a platform outage. Yet many monitoring strategies still focus primarily on the application layer, creating visibility gaps that can delay detection and response when every minute matters.
TCTG Monitoring was built specifically for ecommerce environments, providing real-time visibility into failures, outages and performance issues across the wider commerce ecosystem, not just the storefront itself. Rather than relying solely on predefined alerts, it helps identify issues that could affect customer experience and revenue, while ensuring the right teams are notified instantly.
What makes the difference, however, is that monitoring is combined with specialist ecommerce expertise. When an incident occurs, our teams are alerted in real time and can immediately begin investigating, identifying the source of the issue and coordinating the appropriate response.