Briefs · III · Ideatives Inc. · Updated
Production is the test.
36% of respondents say their organization has a high-impact outage weekly or more often, according to New Relic's 2026 Observability Forecast (2,575 respondents in 24 countries; vendor-funded).
New Relic 2026 Observability Forecast · 2,575 respondents, 24 countries, vendor-funded
How often do companies have high-impact outages?
In New Relic's 2026 Observability Forecast (2,575 respondents, vendor-funded), 36.2% reported high-impact outages weekly or more, 46.7% two to three times a month or less, and 14.9% never.
Failures, detection time and cost
82%
Of respondents hit at least one production failure tied to AI-generated code in the past six months.
New Relic × Hanover, State of AI Coding 2026 · 200 US respondents, vendor-funded
41.3 min
Mean time to detect, per the 2026 Forecast. Mean time to resolve averages 53.6 minutes.
New Relic 2026 Observability Forecast · vendor-funded
57%
Of respondents say their most recent major outage cost over $100,000. 1 in 5 say over $1 million.
Uptime Institute Annual Outage Analysis 2026 · independent
Rated well, then shipped
Perceived
Quality
94% rate AI-generated code higher quality than human-authored code (61% somewhat, 33% much).
Shipped
Unchecked
62% often ship AI code without checking it line by line.
Production
Incidents
78% report more production incidents over the past 12 months.
Production
Senior time
86% report more senior-staff time spent fixing code.
Production
Failures
82% hit a production failure tied to AI code in six months.
Same 200 US respondents, all at companies using AI for development. The 78% and 86% are environment-wide trends; the survey does not attribute them to AI code. New Relic × Hanover, 2026, vendor-funded.
Our view: code that looks good in review can still break under real traffic, and only production shows it. The survey reports these numbers side by side. It does not show that one causes another.
What to do
- Consider a release unproven until it has run under real traffic. Ship behind flags and canaries.
- Alert on detection and resolution time as well as uptime.
- Make AI-generated code emit traces and logs by default, so you can see in production what review missed.
Questions
- How often do companies have high-impact outages?
- 36% of 2,575 respondents to New Relic's 2026 Observability Forecast report a high-impact outage weekly or more; 14.9% report none.
- How long do outages take to detect and resolve?
- Respondents to New Relic's 2026 Observability Forecast report a mean time to detect of 41.3 minutes and a mean time to resolve of 53.6 minutes.
- How much does a major outage cost?
- 57% of Uptime Institute respondents said their most recent major outage cost more than $100,000; 1 in 5 said over $1 million.
Sources
- New Relic, 2026 Observability Forecast, September 2026. 2,575 respondents, 24 countries, 12 industries, run with ETR. Vendor-funded; no margin of error given.
- New Relic press release, 22 September 2026. Same data.
- New Relic × Hanover Research, 2026 State of AI Coding, June 2026. 200 US decision-makers, manager level and up, at companies already using generative AI for development. Vendor-funded; self-reported perceptions, no telemetry.
- Uptime Institute, Annual Outage Analysis 2026, May 2026. Independent; data from its 2025 survey. Covers data-center and IT outages, a different definition from New Relic's.