Annual outage analysis 2026

Outage prevention remains a central focus for data center operators as demand growth, AI-driven workloads and power constraints reshape risk profiles. Despite — and because of — advances in design and operations, operators are grappling with increasing system complexity, grid instability, growing co-dependencies and evolving external threats. This report analyzes recent data on the causes, frequency and consequences of IT and data center outages.

KEY FINDINGS

• For the fifth consecutive year, Uptime Intelligence research suggests outage frequency (on a per-site basis) is declining. However, the pace of improvement has slowed compared with previous years, and around one in 10 still say their last outage had serious or severe impacts.
• External infrastructure failures are becoming more prominent in publicly reported outages. Outages linked to fiber and connectivity issues are rising and are more likely to result in extended disruptions.
• Outage costs continue to rise slowly. More than half (57%) of the respondents to Uptime's 2025 annual survey say their most recent major outage cost more than $100,000. For the second year in a row, one in five say their most recent impactful outage cost more than $1 million.
• Power remains the leading cause of impactful outages, but risks are evolving. Failures involving UPS systems, transfer switches and generators are dominant; however, worsening grid constraints and high-density workloads are introducing new pressure points.
• Operators are adapting investment strategies toward automation and control systems to manage complexity, while resiliency assessments remain more focused on internal systems than on external and systemic risks.
• The frequency of major fires at data centers have increased gradually in recent years, with lithium-ion batteries in UPS systems a clear contributing factor. However, this rise in incidents may be partly explained by the rapid build-out of new facilities, rather than the inherent risk of deploying these batteries.