Annual Outage Analysis 2023

The avoidance of outages is a priority for operators of mission-critical digital infrastructure. In recent years, this has also been a bigger issue for regulators and market authorities. This report brings together and analyzes recent Uptime Institute data on outage trends, causes, costs and consequences.

Key Insights:

• Data relating to outages should be treated skeptically. All methodologies to track the frequency, severity and costs of outages are subject to uncertainty, partly because of a lack of transparency and reliable reporting mechanisms.
• There is evidence that outage rates have been gradually falling in recent years. Although most sites have experienced an outage in the past three years, only a small proportion are serious or severe.
• When outages do occur, they are becoming more expensive, a trend that is likely to continue as dependency on digital services increases. With more than two-thirds of all outages costing more than $100,000, the business case for investing more in resiliency — and training — is becoming stronger.
• Professional third-party digital infrastructure companies — cloud, colocation, telecommunications and hosting companies — account for a growing proportion of outages. This reflects the growing role and importance of these companies.
• Human error and management failures contribute to a considerable number of outages. More training and investment in management processes is required.

• Andy Lawrence, Executive Director of Research
• Lenny Simon, Senior Research Associate