How to compare the severity of outages?

Avoiding outages is a big concern for any operator or service provider, especially one providing a business-critical service. But when an outage does occur, the business impact can vary from “barely noticeable” to “huge and expensive.” Anticipating and modeling the impact of a service interruption should be a part of incident planning and is key to determining the level of investment that should be made to reduce incidents and their impact.

In recent years, Uptime Institute has been collecting data about outages, including the costs, the consequences and, most notably, the most common causes. One of our findings is that organizations often don’t collect full financial data about the impact of outages, or if they do, it might take months for these to become apparent. Many of the costs are hidden, even if the outcry from managers and even non-paying customers is most certainly not. But cost is not a proxy for impact: even a relatively short and inexpensive outage at a big, consumer-facing service provider can attract negative, national headlines.