Website Downtime Cost Statistics: What an Outage Actually Costs by Business Size
Everyone still cites Gartner’s $5,600-per-minute figure — it’s from 2014. We compiled the more recent ITIC, Atlassian, Siemens and Ponemon data into one current comparison, broken out by business size and industry.
📋 What’s in this page
Key Downtime Cost Statistics
Downtime-cost figures vary enormously by source because they measure different things — some are per-minute averages across all company sizes, some are per-incident, and some are industry-specific peaks. Here are the headline numbers, each tied to its original source.
Cost of Downtime by Business Size
The gap between what downtime costs a small business and what it costs a large enterprise isn’t small — it can be a difference of 100× or more per minute. That said, for a small business operating on thin margins, even the lower end of this range can be existential in a way a large enterprise wouldn’t feel.
| Business Size | Cost per Minute | Cost per Hour | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small business (<50 staff) | $137–$500 | $8,220–$30,000 | Pingdom / Avaya benchmarks |
| Mid-size enterprise | ~$5,000 | ~$300,000 | ITIC, 2024 |
| Large enterprise | $16,000–$83,000 | $1M–$5M | ITIC, 2024 |
| Large enterprise (peak, per Gartner) | up to $16,600+ | up to ~$1M+ | Gartner, 2024 |
| Finance, large banks (peak load) | $150,000+ | $9.0M+ | ITIC, 2024 |
Figures reflect direct revenue and productivity loss as reported by each source; methodologies differ, so treat these as directional benchmarks rather than a single universal number.
Gartner’s $5,600-per-minute average has been the default downtime statistic cited across the industry since it was published in 2014 — over a decade ago. Infrastructure costs, cloud dependency, and the revenue a single minute of website downtime can move have all changed substantially since then. More recent data suggests the real number today is highly size-dependent: ITIC’s 2024 research puts mid-size enterprises closer to $5,000/minute and large enterprises far higher, while small businesses sit well below the old blanket average. If you see “$5,600 a minute” cited without a business-size qualifier, it’s almost certainly this same 2014 figure being recycled.
Cost of Downtime by Industry
Business size isn’t the only variable — industry matters just as much. Industries with high per-minute revenue density or safety-critical operations see dramatically higher downtime costs than the general average.
| Industry | Cost per Hour | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Automotive manufacturing | $2.3M | Siemens, 2024 |
| Finance / healthcare (peak) | Up to $5M | Industry surveys, 2024 |
| Retail ecommerce (peak season) | $1M–$2M | Gartner, 2024 |
| General manufacturing | $500,000–$1M | Gartner, 2024 |
| Fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) | $36,000 | Siemens, 2024 |
Real-World Examples
Estimated total cost of major real-world outages
Industry-reported cost estimates for the three incidents above, shown to scale.
Sources: industry reporting on each incident, 2015–2019 (see list above).Free to reuse with attribution and a link to paidhosting.com
For a look at how often major cloud infrastructure providers themselves go down — and how long those outages tend to last — see our cloud provider outage statistics page.
What Actually Drives the Cost
Downtime cost isn’t just lost sales. Across incident-cost studies, the breakdown consistently comes out roughly the same:
Where the cost comes from
- Business disruption — the largest single share, around 35% of total cost
- Direct revenue loss from lost transactions during the outage window
- End-user and employee productivity loss while systems are unavailable
Costs that show up later
- Reputational damage and customer churn following a visible outage
- Engineering and support time spent on incident response and post-mortems
- SLA penalties or refunds owed to affected customers
Sources & Methodology
Figures on this page were compiled from published analyst research and vendor reports. Because downtime-cost studies use different methodologies (self-reported surveys, insurance claims data, and modeled estimates all appear in this space), figures for the same category can vary between sources — we’ve noted the original source for every number so you can trace it back. This page is reviewed and updated as newer analyst data is published.
- Gartner — downtime cost research, 2014 (the widely-cited $5,600/minute average) and 2024 industry estimates
- ITIC (Information Technology Intelligence Consulting) — Hourly Cost of Downtime survey, 2024
- Atlassian — Cost of Downtime, incident management resources
- Ponemon Institute — Cost of Data Center Outages, 2016
- Siemens — industry downtime cost research, 2024
- Uptime Institute — Annual Outage Analysis 2026
- Pingdom / Avaya — small business downtime benchmarks
Cite this analysis
https://www.paidhosting.com/downtime-cost-statistics/
Findings on this page may be reproduced with attribution and a link back to this page. Press and data enquiries: [email protected]