With tax season coming to a close in the United States, IT teams at tax preparation companies and other organizations in the industry will be taking extra care to make sure that their systems can handle a spike in traffic due to a potential last-minute rush of filings.

Tune in to hear The Internet Report hosts discuss how IT teams can navigate major spikes in demand and give customers the best possible digital experience, whether it’s Tax Day, Black Friday, or another high-traffic period.

They’ll also unpack recent outages at companies including Apple and WhatsApp, and explore why a sudden reduction in page load times may indicate functional issues rather than true improvements to the customer’s digital experience.

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CHAPTERS:

00:00 Intro

01:11 Navigating U.S. Tax Season and Spikes in Demand

06:37 Pulse Update: Outage Analysis

06:40 Apple Outage: App Store, TV+, and Music

13:35 WhatsApp, Other Meta Services Disrupted

15:04 Square Outage

17:19 Performance as a Cyber Indicator: XZ Utils

20:48 Panera Bread Outage

22:33 Ray AI Disruption

24:13 Outage Trends: By the Numbers

27:05 Get in Touch

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Want to get in touch?

If you have questions, feedback, or guests you would like to see featured on the show, send us a note at [email protected]. Or follow us on X: @thousandeyes

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ABOUT THE INTERNET REPORT:

This is the Internet Report, a podcast uncovering what’s working and what’s breaking on the Internet—and why.

Tune in every other week for the Pulse Update series to hear from the Internet experts at ThousandEyes as they share the latest data on ISP outages, public cloud provider network outages, collaboration app network outages, and more.

Then, the hosts dig into the most interesting outage events from the prior week, examining popular service outages and discussing what went awry—was it the Internet, or an application issue?

Catch all the episodes on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform:

- Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-internet-report/id1506984526

- Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5ADFvqAtgsbYwk4JiZFqHQ?si=00e9c4b53aff4d08&nd=1&dlsi=eab65c9ea39d4773

- SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/ciscopodcastnetwork/sets/the-internet-report