Website Downtime Cost Statistics: What an Outage Actually Costs in 2026
Everyone still cites Gartner’s $5,600-per-minute figure — it comes from a 2014 blog post. We replaced it with current data from Uptime Institute, ITIC, Splunk, New Relic and Siemens, plus company disclosures from real outages, and show how each measure has changed over time.
📋 What’s in this page
Key Downtime Cost Statistics
Downtime-cost figures vary enormously by source because they measure different things — some are per-hour medians, some are per-incident, some are annual totals for the world’s largest companies. Here are the current headline numbers, each tied to its original source.
Gartner’s $5,600-per-minute average comes from a 2014 Gartner blog post by analyst Andrew Lerner, and it has been recycled across the industry ever since. The other figure that still circulates — about $9,000 a minute — is from the Ponemon Institute’s 2016 study for Emerson Network Power, which put the average unplanned data center outage at $8,851 per minute ($740,357 per outage) across 63 U.S. data centers. Both are roughly a decade old. If you see either cited without a date, it’s the same old number; the sections below use 2024–2026 data instead.
| Ponemon study | Cost per minute | Average cost per outage |
|---|---|---|
| 2010 | $5,617 | $505,502 |
| 2013 | $7,908 | $690,204 |
| 2016 | $8,851 | $740,357 |
Source: Ponemon Institute / Emerson Network Power (now Vertiv), Cost of Data Center Outages, January 2016. Shown for historical context; Ponemon has not repeated the study since.
How Downtime Costs Have Changed
Uptime Institute has asked data center operators what their most recent significant outage cost since 2019. Fewer operators now report outages at all, but the share of costly outages is well above where it was in 2019.
| Uptime Institute report | Most recent outage cost > $100,000 | Most recent outage cost > $1 million |
|---|---|---|
| 2019 baseline | 39% | 11% |
| 2022 report | Over 60% | 15% |
| 2023 report | More than two-thirds | 25% |
| 2024 report | 54% | 16% |
| 2025 report | — | 1 in 5 |
| 2026 report | 57% | 1 in 5 |
Sources: Uptime Institute press release on its 2022 Outage Analysis (2019 baseline and 2022 figures); Annual Outage Analysis 2023; Resiliency Survey executive summary 2024; Annual Outage Analysis 2026 (which reports 1 in 5 above $1 million “for the second consecutive year”). “—” means the figure is not published in the material we could access.
Operators reporting an impactful outage in the past three years
Share of data center operators surveyed by Uptime Institute, by survey year.
Source: Uptime Institute, Annual Outage Analysis 2026 (Global Data Center Survey, 494–781 respondents per year).Free to reuse with attribution and a link to paidhosting.com
| ITIC survey | One hour of downtime costs $300,000+ | One hour costs $1 million to over $5 million |
|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 76% of firms | — |
| 2018 | 81% of firms | — |
| 2019 | 86% of firms | 34% of firms |
| 2024 | Over 90% of mid-size and large enterprises | 41% of enterprises |
Sources: ITIC Hourly Cost of Downtime surveys (2019 release, which also reports the 2014 and 2018 figures; 2024 report, over 1,000 firms surveyed November 2023 – March 2024). The 2024 survey reports the $300,000 figure for mid-size and large enterprises only.
Cost of Downtime by Company Size
Current, primary-source data is strongest for large companies. For the biggest firms, downtime is now measured in hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
We could not find a current, primary-source downtime-cost figure for small businesses — the per-minute ranges for small businesses that circulate online don’t trace back to a published study we could find. For a small site, the most reliable estimate is your own: take the revenue your site brings in per hour, multiply by the hours you could be down, and add the cost of fixing the problem and any customers you might lose. Our downtime cost calculator does this for you.
Cost of Downtime by Industry
Industries with high revenue per minute or continuous production lines see the highest downtime costs.
| Industry | Cost per Hour | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Automotive manufacturing (large plant) | $2.3M | Siemens, True Cost of Downtime 2024 |
| Financial services & insurance (high-impact outage, median) | $2.2M | New Relic, Observability Forecast 2024 |
| Telecommunications (high-impact outage, median) | $2M | New Relic, Observability Forecast 2025 |
| Media & entertainment (high-impact outage, median) | $2M | New Relic, Observability Forecast 2025 |
| IT organizations (high-impact outage, median) | $1.6M | New Relic, Observability Forecast 2025 |
| Retail & ecommerce (high-impact outage, median) | $1M | New Relic, Observability Forecast 2025 |
| Fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) manufacturing | $36,000 | Siemens, True Cost of Downtime 2024 |
Siemens figures cover lost production in large industrial plants (data April 2019 – March 2023); New Relic figures are medians for high-business-impact IT outages. Siemens also found that unplanned downtime costs Fortune Global 500 companies about $1.4 trillion a year — 11% of their revenues — and that an average large plant loses 27 hours a month to unplanned downtime, down from 39 hours in 2019.
Real-World Examples
Estimated cost of the July 2024 CrowdStrike outage, by industry
Estimated direct losses to affected Fortune 500 companies (excluding Microsoft).
Source: Parametrix Insurance, “CrowdStrike to Cost Fortune 500 $5.4b”, 24 July 2024.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 Causes the Outages
Knowing where outages come from is the first step to avoiding their cost.
Data center outages
- Power was the leading cause of impactful data center outages in 2025, at 45% (down from 54% in 2024)
- 92% of operators say human error contributed at least in a minor way to their most recent impactful outage
- 87% say their most recent impactful outage could have been avoided with better management, processes or configuration
Global 2000 downtime
- 43% of downtime incidents are network- or IT-environment related
- 32% are driven by cybersecurity incidents
- 24% stem from application or infrastructure failures
Sources: Uptime Institute, Annual Outage Analysis 2026; Splunk, The Hidden Costs of Downtime 2026.
Sources & Methodology
Every figure on this page comes from the organization that collected it: surveys by Uptime Institute, ITIC, Splunk (with Oxford Economics) and New Relic; Siemens’ production-loss analysis; company filings and results; and Parametrix’s insured-loss estimate. Downtime-cost studies use different methods — self-reported surveys, production data and modeled estimates — so figures from different sources measure different things and should not be combined. Older figures (Gartner 2014, Ponemon 2016) are shown only for context. This page is reviewed and updated as newer research is published.
- Uptime Institute — Annual Outage Analysis 2026 and press release (May 2026); Annual Outage Analysis 2023; Resiliency Survey executive summary 2024; 2022 Outage Analysis press release
- ITIC — 2024 Hourly Cost of Downtime Report; 2019 Hourly Cost of Downtime survey
- Splunk — The Hidden Costs of Downtime 2026; The Hidden Costs of Downtime (with Oxford Economics), June 2024
- New Relic — Observability Forecast 2025 (September 2025); financial services report (April 2025)
- Siemens — The True Cost of Downtime 2024
- Ponemon Institute / Emerson Network Power — Cost of Data Center Outages, 2016
- Delta Air Lines — September quarter 2016 results; Form 8-K, 8 August 2024; September quarter 2024 results
- Parametrix Insurance — CrowdStrike outage loss estimate, 24 July 2024
- Gartner — “The Cost of Downtime” blog post by Andrew Lerner, 2014 (historical context only)
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 inquiries: [email protected]