Uptime Institute 2022 Outage Analysis - press release

Overview

The release summarises the June 2022 edition of Uptime Institute's annual outage analysis. It stresses that overall outage rates have stayed largely flat while the economic and operational consequences of each outage have grown noticeably worse. The evidence combines the 2022 Resiliency Survey with publicly reported outage incidents. Because the source is a press release, it lists headline findings rather than methodological tables, and the full report is published separately.

The sharpest finding concerns cost. More than 60% of failures now cost at least $100,000, compared with 39% in 2019, and the share of failures above $1 million rose from 11% to 15%. Even with a stable number of incidents, the average bill per outage keeps growing. That calls for revisiting the assumptions used when judging the return on redundancy and maintainability investments.

On causes, power systems stand out. Power-related problems account for 43% of significant outages, and UPS failures are the single biggest cause of power incidents. Human error is treated separately: 85% of human-error incidents trace back to staff not following procedures or to flawed procedures themselves. Technical redundancy alone is therefore not enough, and written, rehearsed operating procedures are part of reliability.

The release also looks at the duration of public outages. In 2021 nearly 30% of publicly reported outages lasted more than 24 hours, against 8% in 2017. Of the 108 publicly reported outages that year, 27 were serious or severe. In the survey, 80% of managers and operators said they had experienced some outage in the previous three years. Its value to a designer is in showing which risk statistically dominates when choosing a UPS topology or maintenance approach, and in setting outage-cost assumptions on a realistic footing.

Key points

1. 80% of managers and operators experienced some outage in the past three years (2022 Resiliency Survey).
2. More than 60% of failures cost at least $100,000, up from 39% in 2019.
3. The share of failures costing over $1 million rose from 11% to 15%.
4. Power-related problems cause 43% of significant outages.
5. UPS failures are the single biggest cause of power incidents.
6. 85% of human-error incidents stem from staff not following procedures or from flawed procedures.
7. Nearly 30% of public outages in 2021 lasted over 24 hours, versus 8% in 2017.
8. Of 108 publicly reported outages in 2021, 27 were serious or severe.

Using it in design

• When selecting a UPS topology, cite UPS failure as the leading power-incident cause and offer a maintenance bypass and redundant modules as defaults.
• Use a baseline above $100,000 per significant event in outage-cost assumptions and build sensitivity analysis around it.
• Do not rely on equipment redundancy alone; add written and rehearsed maintenance and commissioning procedures to the handover criteria.
• Assess recovery and repair times for long-duration scenarios separately, since the share of outages exceeding 24 hours is growing.

Who should read it

Data centre design engineers, operations managers and decision makers building the case for resilience investment.

Publication details

Authors

Uptime Institute

Publisher

Uptime Institute

Year

2022

Document language

English

Source type

Industry body

Access

Free to read

Licence

Copyright retained; citation only — the publisher’s terms apply to the original document

Citation