As digital reliance soars and outages hit hard, Joe Byrne, Global Field CTO at LaunchDarkly, argues that proactive software delivery, not reactive firefighting, is now critical for brand reputation, team morale and avoiding costly downtime.
We’re in an era where having access to IT services is a given across almost all sectors. However, this reliability is increasingly at risk. Recent global power outages in Spain and Portugal cut access to IT devices, halting the Madrid Open Tennis Tournament and stopping people getting home on the subway. Closer to home, sustained outages at major UK retailers have left customers unable to order goods online, fearful of sharing their data, and shelves empty.
This comes as digital dependency is at an all-time high. More consumers than ever are relying on banking, retail and social media apps to carry out daily activities, while most businesses are reliant on interconnected digital systems.
Outages aren’t just a technical concern but are fast becoming a board issue – when they happen, the spotlight is on CIOs to take action. Yet, the old ways of shipping and supporting software are no longer fit for purpose. The challenge is to balance speed, stability, and scale, without compromising the reliability customers and regulators expect.
Businesses leaders must see their IT systems and software as central to their success, and this means CIOs must move beyond reactive IT firefighting and take a proactive, strategic approach to software delivery.
The fallout of digital downtime
Recent outages have shown that increasing downtime is not isolated to a single sector. Across industries, UK enterprises face mounting scrutiny over digital reliability. Outside of retail, the banking industry has seen over 800 hours of unplanned outages among major banks alone, which is the equivalent of more than 33 days of unplanned tech and systems outages over the last two years.
While the root causes of these disruptions varied, they all revealed the same uncomfortable truth – the fragility of deeply interconnected IT systems and how quickly they can unravel during a crisis.
As UK enterprises deepen their digital infrastructure, system reliability has become inseparable from brand reputation, and a critical KPI that now defines CIOs’ success. These disruptions don’t just impact businesses bottom line, they also damage customer trust and business continuity across the sector. When IT systems are so interconnected, even standard software feature rollouts can become risky deployments without the right standards in place.
What caused the outages in Spain and Portugal?
- The primary technical cause identified was the unexpected shutdown of the France-Spain high-voltage interconnector at 12:33 p.m. CEST. This critical artery linked the Iberian Peninsula to the broader European grid. A series of generation trips in southern Spain (a loss of 2200 MW in generation capacity) shortly before this triggered a rapid cascade. The Iberian grid’s frequency dropped and voltage increased, leading to its automatic disconnection from France and widespread system collapse.
- Spain’s interconnection level with the rest of the EU is relatively low (around 5% of its capacity), making it more vulnerable to isolated incidents compared to better-connected regions.
- While not the direct trigger, experts highlight that the high penetration of variable renewable energy sources (like solar and wind, which constituted around 70% of Spain’s generation before the blackout) contributed to the grid’s fragility. Unlike traditional thermal plants, renewables often lack the “inertia” (kinetic energy from spinning turbines) needed to stabilise grid frequency during sudden disturbances.The grid lacked sufficient fast-responding flexible resources (like fast-reacting gas turbines, pumped hydro, or battery energy storage systems) to offset the abrupt loss of imported power and maintain stability.
Outage trends in Europe:
Beyond specific blackouts, the European energy sector continues to grapple with increasing general threats:
Heatwaves (June-July 2025): Recent heatwaves across Europe (e.g., in Germany, France, Spain, Poland) have significantly stressed power systems. While not causing widespread blackouts like the Iberian event, they led to:
Increased demand: Daily power demand increased by up to 14% in Spain and 9% in France during peak heat.
Thermal plant outages: Heatwaves can force thermal power plants to reduce output or shut down (e.g., due to river water temperature limits for cooling), creating additional stress on the grid. At least 7 GW of offline capacity was marked as “Forced” during the July 2025 heatwave due to such issues.
Outages from cyberthreats
- Rise in attacks: Since 2022, the energy sector cybersecurity centre EnergiCERT has counted 48 publicly known attacks against European energy and supply companies. Of these, 15 attacks specifically affected the networks’ operational technology (OT), the systems that control the grid.
- Geographical targeting: The percentage of cyberattacks targeting EU countries rose significantly from 9.8% to 46.5% during the first six months of 2023.
- Ransomware: 31 ransomware attacks were recorded against European energy companies since 2022, with almost half involving data theft.
- Increased threat level: The International Energy Agency (IEA) noted a doubling of cyberattacks against the energy sector globally between 2020 and 2022, with a record 1,101 events targeting utilities worldwide in 2022.
The hidden cost to tech teams
The moment something goes down, engineering and operations teams are thrust into crisis mode. For CIOs, this leads to mounting technical debt and deteriorating morale. Innovation takes a backseat as developers are forced to solve fallout from the disruption.
Tech teams are on the frontline during these moments, and any ‘business as usual’ activity is pushed to the sidelines to jump into what are usually rapidly evolving, reactive situations to mitigate as much damage as possible. As our global systems are increasingly interconnected, tech teams are also more vulnerable.
There are several wider impacts of these more frequent, unpredictable periods of downtime. In the immediate term, customers might be unable to fulfil purchases and orders; and this can lead to knock on damage to businesses’ reputation and bottom line. For tech teams specifically, the time spent in reactive, crisis mode may also have an impact on rollout of standard features, monitoring and management as usual. Business must have proactive plans in place for tech teams to be able to manage safe feature rollout, and ensure day-to-day activity can continue as usual even during the worst moments.
Here, maintaining resilient systems is not only about keeping systems online, but also protecting the team’s ability to move forward without sacrificing on quality or security.
CIOs are facing mounting pressure to innovate
At the same time, CIOs today are under more pressure than ever to drive innovation for enterprises. The explosion of AI is forcing CIOs to consider how, and even if they should embed AI into their company models. Many are looking to integrate AI directly into product launches and existing systems. This can increase the surface area for threats, requiring more monitoring tools, and potentially leaving businesses more vulnerable to ransomware attacks. This adds further uncertainty for CIOs, at a time when there is pressure to prove ROI from any AI investment.
Against this backdrop, CIOs must reimagine how software is shipped and supported. Customers are constantly demanding innovation and new features from apps and websites, which can add pressure to IT teams striving to deliver optimal experiences. Daily, regular and ongoing software releases are crucial for everyday updates, through to testing and improving digital products and services. If not prioritised, feature rollouts could well be the cause of a future outage if a deployment goes wrong.
For the teams planning and rolling out software updates, resilience and reliability is key to avoid a business winding up as the next news headline due to what could have been a totally preventable, botched software deployment. So, how do CIOs marry the two demands?
Enterprises don’t need to choose between innovation and resilience
This is where intelligent feature deployment is key. CIOs must be supported to tackle these challenges, reduce risk and encourage tech teams to keep developing and testing new features, even in uncertain times. As engineering teams demand more control over risk and reliability, they must have the tools to double down on monitoring, controls and rollbacks within the release process to reduce risk.
Guarded Releases are the new standard in software development, ensuring that new features are delivered safely and effectively. They enable teams to deploy incrementally, monitor impact in real time, and reduce risk while gaining valuable performance insights. This matters now more than ever, as enterprises are looking for ways to build confidence in deploying new functionality, without the risk of widespread disruptions seen recently.
With many of the recent outages leading to businesses having to compensate customers, especially as banks experienced issues during pay day, CIOs need to offer solutions internally to mitigate the chances of this happening again. And for customers, this translates to fewer crashes, more seamless digital experiences and reduced service downtime.
Reducing risk of downtime
Ultimately, CIOs must prioritise flexibility and security during uncertain times, and this should extend to their feature rollout strategies. Enterprises never know when downtime could strike, and tech teams must be prepared.
By equipping teams with the necessary tools to prioritise safe feature rollout, CIOs can secure some more peace of mind for the wider business, by reducing risk of an outage caused by a faulty rollout, and avoiding a hit to reputation.
During periods of crisis, CIOs should be able to feel relieved that they have built proactive, flexible strategies. This means that if a system is targeted during a rollout, the feature can be withdrawn quickly and securely, reducing risk. As a result, CIOs should not only consider tools, but to drive a wider cultural shift and rethink traditional release cycles, investing in approaches that can give teams more control over how, when, and where features are deployed. Guarded Releases can help drive this mindset forward, and give teams an opportunity to excel.
Resilience as a new measure of success
While innovation is key, resilience, stability and security have become just as important to business leaders in a vulnerable IT era. It’s crucial that CIOs feel they are equipped to steer the tech team and wider business during tricky times and putting safe feature rollout at the heart of their strategy is one way they can do so.
