Last week saw a rise in slowdowns experienced by two leading online banking websites – Bank of America and Chase.  Chase’s twitter account tweeted, “Chase.com is experiencing intermittent issues. We’re working to restore full connectivity & apologize for any inconvenience” – only one day after a similar statement came from Bank of America. And while some hacker groups claimed responsibility for the outages, both banks maintained that there was no evidence to support these claims. Instead, what appears more likely is that the issues were caused by a “distributed denial of service” (DDoS) attack, which can causes similar interruptions through varied means of flooding traffic to a particular network — thereby overloading its servers.

Whatever the reason, website outages are on the rise, and with mounting worldwide traffic, issues of any kind remain costly, frustrating, and altogether damaging occurrences. For these reasons, it’s imperative to report on slow or non-responsive web applications before your end-users are impacted (be it your employees or customers).

AlertFox is our solution for proactively monitoring the performance of our websites and web applications. What’s yours?