SOFIAH NICHOLE SALIVIO

News Editor

20i has warned online businesses to prepare for a surge in website traffic at half-time during England’s World Cup semi-final against Argentina. Similar patterns have already appeared during earlier England matches, the web hosting company said.

Data from its hosting platform showed traffic during the half-time break in England’s quarter-final win over Norway rose sharply, peaking at 27% above the average for the same period across the previous three days. Such sudden rebounds can strain websites that are not set up to absorb large numbers of visitors arriving within minutes.

Major sporting fixtures can create a distinct challenge for retailers and other online organisations. Visitor numbers often fall while a match is in progress, then return quickly when viewers check their phones during the interval or after the final whistle.

According to 20i, online activity during England’s earlier matches against Croatia and Ghana dropped by an average of 22.5% while fans watched the action. It estimated that decline equated to a potential £22 million slowdown in spending for UK retailers during those periods.

The issue, 20i argued, is less about steady growth in demand than the speed of the change. A rapid burst of traffic can affect page loading times, checkout processes and site stability, particularly for eCommerce operators handling purchases on mobile devices.

Traffic swings

For businesses with limited hosting resources or poorly tuned websites, the operational risk is immediate. Slower pages can prompt users to abandon baskets, while interruptions at payment stages can lead directly to lost sales and customer complaints.

The warning comes as football audiences reshape online behaviour throughout the day. Retailers, media groups and service providers can all see short-term shifts in visitor levels when large televised events draw attention away from digital activity and then release it in concentrated bursts.

20i urged organisations to review whether their hosting arrangements can scale quickly enough to cope with sudden increases in traffic. It also highlighted common technical steps such as caching, using a content delivery network and testing systems in advance to identify bottlenecks.

It also recommended monitoring site performance in real time and checking that image files and other page elements are optimised for mobile use. Businesses should also test key customer journeys, including checkout and payment flows, under heavier demand.

Those steps reflect a broader eCommerce concern that consumer attention now shifts rapidly between live events and shopping activity. A match break can compress browsing, purchasing and payment into a narrow window, leaving little margin for websites that respond slowly.

Lloyd Cobb, Director, 20i, described the pattern as unusually hard to predict and manage. “Major sporting events create some of the most unpredictable traffic patterns businesses will experience. It’s not just the volume of visitors that matters – it’s how quickly they arrive. During England’s match against Norway we saw traffic jump dramatically at half-time, and we expect to see similar patterns when millions of people watch England face Argentina. Businesses that aren’t prepared risk slower websites, interrupted customer journeys and lost sales at exactly the moment people are reaching for their phones,” Cobb said.

20i hosts more than 1 million websites, giving it a broad view of short-term traffic shifts during nationally watched events. Its analysis suggests that for online businesses, the commercial impact of a major football match may depend as much on readiness for the break in play as on the event itself.

The Rising Sun & Pad Thai Cuisine on High Street in Thame was visited by South Oxfordshire enviromental health officers earlier this year.

One key problem on the day was the management of food safety, which was deemed to require “major improvement”.

READ MORE: Major Oxfordshire caravan park fire was accidental says fire service

One category noted as being “generally satisfactory”, however, was the cleanliness and condition of both the facilities and building.

Meanwhile hygienic food handling was deemed as “improvement necessary”.

The website invites customers to enjoy the delights of a traditional British pub – oak beams, stone floors, great beers – and the flavours of fantastic Thai cuisine.

They also participated in this years Thame Pride with open mic nights and professional singers coming on later in the night to perform for punters.

Altimetrik has joined the World Economic Forum’s Centre for AI Excellence, placing the company among organisations contributing to the Forum’s work on responsible artificial intelligence.

It will bring its work in AI engineering, data and platform systems to the Centre, where members contribute to governance, industry adoption and the use of AI across large organisations. Altimetrik’s involvement centres on ALTi AIOS, its AI engineering operating system, designed for large businesses with established legacy systems.

The Centre for AI Excellence is one of the World Economic Forum’s hubs for AI governance and adoption. Its programmes focus on encouraging innovation, preparing industries and societies for broader AI use, and promoting what it describes as trustworthy technology through governance frameworks.

For Altimetrik, the membership adds an international policy and standards dimension to a business focused on deploying AI inside complex corporate environments. More than 10,000 engineering practitioners are working on AI in production across sectors including banking, financial services and insurance, manufacturing, retail, automotive, healthcare and life sciences.

The announcement also reflects a wider shift in the AI market, as attention moves from experimental pilots to the challenge of integrating AI into older technology estates. Many large companies are trying to apply new AI systems without replacing decades of accumulated software, data infrastructure and operational processes.

That issue is central to Altimetrik’s pitch. ALTi AIOS is built for so-called brownfield enterprise environments, where existing systems must be connected to AI tools rather than rebuilt from scratch. The platform provides a unified operational layer for managing models, data, governance and interactions between people and AI systems.

Enterprise Focus

Altimetrik argues that one of the main barriers to broader AI use in large organisations is not access to models, but the difficulty of embedding them into live operations with proper controls. In that context, governance, orchestration and trust have become as important to buyers as model performance.

Raj Sundaresan, Chief Executive Officer at Altimetrik, linked the membership to that agenda.

“Joining the World Economic Forum’s Centre for AI Excellence is a milestone for Altimetrik and an opportunity to help shape the global agenda on enterprise AI,” said Raj Sundaresan, Chief Executive Officer at Altimetrik.

“AI is receiving unprecedented attention, but real transformation requires more than deploying tools. It requires organisations to be engineered to run AI responsibly, securely and at scale,” he said.

Those remarks underline a growing debate in the corporate AI market over what responsible deployment means in practice. For some companies, it centres on model safety and data handling. For others, it also includes auditability, operational resilience and the ability to monitor how AI systems behave when embedded in customer-facing or regulated workflows.

Altimetrik says ALTi AIOS is intended to address those operational concerns by standardising how organisations manage AI systems and by building governance into the deployment process from the outset. The aim is to move AI beyond isolated experiments towards broader use across the business with measurable results.

Wider Debate

Altimetrik’s addition to the Centre comes as businesses, regulators and industry groups continue to debate how global standards for AI should develop. While there is broad agreement that governance is needed, there is less consensus on how to translate high-level principles into day-to-day operating practices inside large companies.

That leaves room for engineering-led firms to argue that responsible AI is as much an implementation issue as a policy one. In sectors such as financial services, healthcare and manufacturing, the challenge often lies in integrating new systems into regulated and business-critical environments without disrupting existing operations.

Niraj Nagrani, Chief Data and AI Officer at Altimetrik, framed the issue around system design and control.

“The enterprises that define the next decade will be the ones that engineer context, orchestration, governance and trust into every layer of their agentic systems, not bolt it on after the fact,” said Niraj Nagrani, Chief Data and AI Officer at Altimetrik.

“The World Economic Forum’s Centre for AI Excellence is the right platform to advance that agenda, and we’re proud to bring ALTi AIOS and our production AI experience to that conversation,” he said.

Altimetrik joins the Centre as companies seek a stronger voice in how AI rules and standards are shaped, particularly around deployment in established enterprises where the technical and governance issues are more complex than in greenfield systems.