Dive Brief:
- The median cost of outages with high business impact was $7.75 million, according to New Relic's Observability Forecast report published Tuesday. Enterprise Technology Research consulted 1,700 technology professionals on behalf of New Relic.
- More than 3 in 5 technologists said outages cost their organizations at least $100,000 per hour, while one-third said hourly costs ran up to $500,000. For 1 in 5, companies endure $1 million in hourly costs due to an outage.
- Outages causing high business impact take more than 30 minutes to resolve, according to 3 in 5 respondents. For one-third of companies, resolution can take an hour or more.
Dive Insight:
The modern enterprise relies heavily on digital systems across functions, from payment processing and logistics to staff management. An IT outage that disrupts everyday operations quickly becomes a priority for any CIO.
The financial hit of an outage is typically linked to lost revenue, said Peter Pezaris, chief strategy and design officer at New Relic.
"If you're developing an e-commerce site, for example, for every hour your website is not available, you're not taking orders, and therefore, you're not tracking revenue for that period of time," Pezaris said.
Losses mount quickly for large enterprises when outages impact core operations, climbing to tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.
Southwest is one costly example. In December 2022, the company's digital systems failed, leading the airline to cancel more than 17,000 flights over the holiday period and face more than $725 million in associated costs.
As a response, the company launched a $5 billion, five-year transformation project to address multiple components of its IT estate, including crew engagement technology and crew recovery systems.