Let’s be honest about what the next two weeks look like.
Across the tech ecosystem, code freeze is officially in effect. Engineering teams are closing their laptops, Customer Support is rotating onto a skeleton crew schedule, and slack channels are quieting down. The prevailing mood is one of rest.
But while your internal capacity is dropping to its lowest point of the year, your users are doing the exact opposite.
For Fintech, Travel, and E-commerce platforms, late December isn’t a break, it is the World Cup(looking forward to that next year btw). Transaction volumes spike. The emotional stakes of every user interaction skyrocket. A failed transfer on a random Tuesday in July is an annoyance, but a failed transfer on December 24th, when a user is trying to send money to their family, is a crisis.
This creates a holiday trust gap.
At the exact moment when your users need your platform to be flawless, your ability to respond to issues is at its weakest.
In a standard week, if a user encounters a silent failure, like a checkout button that freezes or a document upload that hangs, they might make a complain, and a ticket could be created, which your support team picks it up, flags engineering, and it’s resolved in hours.
But in December? That user knows no one is answering the ticket. They see the we are experiencing high volumes banner and they don’t bother complaining. They just leave. And. You. Don’t. Want. That.
During the holidays, Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) traditionally spikes by 300% for many startups. Why? Because the bugs that occur aren’t server crashes that trigger PagerDuty alerts. They are client-side frictions, app freezes on mid-range devices, timeout loops on overloaded networks, that happen silently on the user’s phone.
If your skeleton crew is relying solely on support tickets to spot these issues, you are flying blind through the busiest time of the year.
The best gift you can give your product this season isn’t a new feature, it’s visibility.
This is the ultimate test of the Trust Stack. When the humans go home, your infrastructure needs to be smart enough to tell you what’s happening. You need to know that 15% of users in Lagos are failing to complete bookings due to a specific API timeout, before they churn to a competitor. You need to catch the silence before it becomes a permanent exit.
As we wrap up 2025, take a moment to look at your dashboards. Are they telling you the whole story? Or are they just showing you green lights while your users struggle in the dark?
Never forget, Reliability doesn’t take a holiday.
Thank you for building, learning, and refining the Trust Stack with us this year. Rest well, recharge, and prepare for a year of zero-tolerance for friction.
See you in 2026.
