Are outages getting longer?

One of the findings of Uptime Institute’s recently published report Annual outage analysis 2020 is that the most serious categories of outages — those that cause a significant disruption in services — are becoming more severe and more costly. This isn’t entirely surprising: individuals and businesses alike are becoming ever more dependent on IT, and it is becoming harder to replicate or replace an IT service with a manual system.

But one of the findings raises both red flags and questions: Setting aside those that were partial and incidental (which had minimal impact), publicly reported outages over the past three years appear to be getting longer. And this, in turn, is likely to be one of the reasons why the costs and severity of outages have been rising.