Uptime Institute Annual Outage Analysis 2026 (8th annual) — press release (with 2025 findings)

Overview

The summary reports that per-site outage frequency has declined for five consecutive years but that improvement is slowing. A clear trend is the growing share of external infrastructure (grid, fibre/connectivity, third-party cloud) in publicly reported outages. Third-party providers (cloud, telco, colocation) account for about two-thirds of publicly reported outages over nine years. On site, power remains the leading cause, dominated by UPS, transfer-switch and generator failures. The 2025 release adds that IT and networking issues were 23% of impactful outages in 2024.

Building a redundant power chain is therefore not enough; transfer and switching points are a weak link in their own right. On cost, the 2026 release says 57% of respondents' most recent major outage cost more than $100,000, and one in five exceeded $1 million, for the second year running. Roughly one in ten outages has serious or severe impact. On human error, about 40% of organisations suffered a major human-error outage within three years, and 85% of those stemmed from staff not following procedures or from flawed procedures.

The full report requires registration; the figures here come from the 2026 and 2025 press releases, so breakdown detail is missing. The shared message of the findings is that outages often occur not in the redundant component itself but in the transitions between components and in human intervention: transfer-switch failures sit on the same list as UPS and generator failures, and procedure-related causes explain 85% of human-error outages.

Key points

1. 57% of respondents said their most recent major outage cost more than $100,000; 1 in 5 exceeded $1 million (second year running)
2. Power is the leading cause of impactful outages; UPS, transfer switch and generator failures dominate
3. IT and networking issues were 23% of impactful outages in 2024
4. About 40% of organisations had a major human-error outage in 3 years; 85% of those came from not following procedures or flawed procedures
5. Third-party providers account for about two-thirds of publicly reported outages over nine years
6. About 1 in 10 outages has serious or severe impact
7. Per-site outage frequency fell for five consecutive years, but improvement is slowing

Using it in design

• Weight UPS, ATS/STS and generator failure modes highest in the reliability model
• Recommend maintenance bypass, ATS redundancy and generator load-bank testing by default
• Require MOP/SOP/EOP generation for each critical asset, since procedural failures dominate human error
• Add utility/grid and dual-carrier fibre diversity as explicit site-risk inputs

Who should read it

Engineers building reliability models, operations managers assessing risk, and consultants explaining outage cost to management.

Related standards

• NFPA 110
• IEEE 3006.7
• Uptime Tier Standard: Operational Sustainability

Publication details

Authors

Uptime Institute

Publisher

Uptime Institute

Year

2026

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