Annual Outage Analysis 2024 - executive summary landing page

Overview

This record is based on the public landing page of the 2024 annual outage analysis published by Uptime Intelligence (UII Keynote Report 131, March 2024). The report covers outage trends, causes, costs and consequences for IT and data center operations. The full 29-page report is reserved for customers, while a 10-page executive summary can be downloaded after completing a registration form.

Part of the underlying evidence comes from a 2023 survey. Of the respondents, 54% said their most recent significant, serious or severe outage cost more than $100,000, and 16% said it cost more than $1 million. These shares show that outages are not merely a technical nuisance but carry direct financial consequences for operators and their customers. Costs of this scale give an economic basis against which investment in redundancy and operating quality can be compared, and they can be used at management level to justify design decisions.

On causes, the headline conclusion is that power issues are the most common cause of serious and severe data center outages, while network issues are the largest single cause of IT service outages. Four in five respondents said their most recent serious outage could have been prevented with better management, processes and configuration, which points to operational discipline rather than infrastructure alone as a major source of failures.

The report also notes that, on average, 10 to 20 high-profile IT outages or data center events worldwide each year cause serious or severe loss. Cyber-related incidents, responsible for many of the most severe outages, are rising. A limit to keep in mind is that this record relies only on the landing page and press material; the full report text has not been used here.

Key points

1. The 10-page executive summary is an excerpt of a 29-page report, available after registration.
2. In the 2023 survey, 54% of respondents said their latest significant outage cost more than $100,000.
3. For 16% of respondents the latest outage cost exceeded $1 million.
4. Power issues are the most common cause of serious and severe data center outages.
5. Network issues are the largest single cause of IT service outages.
6. Four in five respondents said their latest serious outage was preventable with better management, processes and configuration.
7. On average 10 to 20 high-profile outages or events worldwide per year cause serious or severe loss.
8. Cyber-related incidents, behind many of the most severe outages, are increasing.

Using it in design

• Use it as a reference for annual outage statistics when justifying redundancy in the power chain.
• Treat power distribution (UPS, generators, switching) as the most frequent outage source and prioritise single points of failure there.
• Review network path redundancy as a separate design check for IT service continuity.
• Use the outage cost shares in executive presentations to support the case for resilience investment.
• Include operating procedures, configuration management and training in the design handover, since most outages are reported as preventable.

Who should read it

Designers, operations managers and decision makers who need evidence for data center reliability, risk and investment decisions.

Publication details

Authors

Uptime Institute

Publisher

Uptime Institute

Year

2024

Document number

UII Keynote Report 131

Document language

English

Source type

Industry body

Access

Citation only

Licence

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

Citation