Annual outage analysis 2024

Avoiding digital infrastructure failures remains paramount for data center owners and operators. This report analyzes recent Uptime Institute data on IT and data center outage trends: their causes, costs and consequences.

KEY FINDINGS

• Data relating to outages should be treated skeptically. All methodologies used to track the frequency, severity and costs of outages are subject to uncertainty, partly because of a lack of transparency and reliable reporting mechanisms.
• Uptime research suggests that overall outage frequency and severity continue to decline. However, cyber-related incidents — which are responsible for many of the most severe outages — are on the rise, causing extensive and serious disruption.
• Outages are costly. More than half (54%) of the respondents to the 2023 Uptime Institute data center survey say their most recent significant, serious or severe outage cost more than $100,000, with 16% saying that their most recent outage cost more than $1 million.
• Power issues are consistently the most common cause of serious and severe data center outages. However, network-related issues are the largest single cause of IT service outages.
• Four in five respondents to the 2023 Uptime Institute data center survey say that their most recent serious outage could have been prevented with better management, processes and configuration. This suggests that, as in previous years, there is an opportunity to reduce outages through training and process review.
• Uptime data suggests that each year there are, on average, 10 to 20 high-profile IT outages or data center events globally that cause serious or severe financial loss, business and customer disruption, reputational loss and, in extreme cases, loss of life.