How much does website downtime cost?

How much does website downtime cost per hour?

Note: these are survey-based averages that vary enormously by company size and industry.

• Over 90% of mid-size and large enterprises lose more than $300,000 per hour, per ITIC.
• 41% report hourly losses between $1 million and $5 million or more.
• 97% of large enterprises put the cost at $100,000 per hour or higher.
• Top industries like banking, healthcare and retail exceed $5 million an hour.
• ITIC notes that micro SMBs typically do not reach hundreds of thousands of dollars in hourly downtime losses, but even smaller outage assumptions such as $10,000 to $25,000 per hour can be serious for a small business.

The figures look extreme until you count everything downtime breaks. Lost sales, idle staff, SLA penalties and reputation damage compound fast, which is why even a brief outage can become expensive quickly, especially for revenue-dependent sites and enterprise systems.

How much does downtime cost per minute?

Note: per-minute figures are derived from hourly survey data and apply differently by company size.

• A widely cited Gartner baseline puts average downtime at about $5,600 per minute.
• That works out to roughly $336,000 per hour across all organizations.
• At ITIC’s $300,000-per-hour level, the cost is about $5,000 per minute.
• At $1 million per hour, downtime costs around $16,700 per minute.
• ITIC’s smaller-business examples translate to roughly $167 to $417 per minute at $10,000 to $25,000 per hour.

The popular $9,000-per-minute figure should be treated as a large-organization benchmark, not a universal website-downtime cost. The honest takeaway is that per-minute cost scales with your revenue, operations and dependency on the affected system, so the right number is your own.

What counts as good website uptime (99.9% versus 99.99%)?

• 99.9% uptime, or “three nines,” is a common baseline SLA level for many hosting and web services.
• It still allows about 8.76 hours of downtime per year.
• 99.99%, or “four nines,” cuts that to roughly 53 minutes a year.
• 99.999%, or “five nines,” allows just over 5 minutes a year and is a high-availability target for demanding systems.
• ITIC’s own survey data shows 90% of organizations now require at least 99.99% availability.

The jump from three to four nines sounds tiny but means everything. Shaving 0.09% off the guarantee turns nearly nine hours of allowed downtime into under an hour, which is the difference between a noticeable outage and an invisible one.

What are the leading causes of website downtime?

Note: cause breakdowns come from industry surveys and vary by year, survey scope and respondent base.

• Network and connectivity issues are the biggest reported cause of end-to-end IT service outages in recent Uptime Institute research, at about 30%.
• In Uptime’s 2024 survey coverage, networking and connectivity issues were reported at 31%, with IT system and software issues at 22%.
• For major network-related outages, configuration and change-management failures were the most common cause, at about 50%.
• For major data center downtime specifically, power-related outages remain the largest cause, accounting for about 54% of cases in Network World’s summary of Uptime’s 2025 analysis.
• Uptime’s analysis points to process, procedure, configuration and change-management failures as major preventable contributors.

The striking finding is how ordinary many outage causes are. Uptime’s analysis points to configuration, change-management and process failures as recurring contributors, which means better detection, documentation and change control can reduce many preventable incidents.

How much uptime does each SLA level guarantee in minutes per year?

• 99% uptime allows 3.65 days, or about 5,256 minutes, of downtime per year.
• 99.9% allows 8.76 hours, or 525.6 minutes, per year.
• 99.99% allows 52.6 minutes per year.
• 99.999% allows just 5.26 minutes per year.
• 99.9999%, or “six nines,” allows only about 32 seconds per year.

These figures are exact, derived straight from the percentages, not estimates. Each additional nine cuts allowed downtime by roughly tenfold, which is why every nine costs dramatically more to engineer and guarantee.

What were the costliest website and cloud outages?

Note: outage cost estimates come from analyst and press reporting and are approximate.

• Parametrix estimated the July 2024 CrowdStrike outage caused roughly $5.4 billion in direct financial losses for Fortune 500 companies, excluding Microsoft.
• Microsoft estimated that CrowdStrike’s update affected about 8.5 million Windows devices, less than 1% of Windows machines.
• CrowdStrike said the outage was caused by a defect in a Falcon content update for Windows hosts and was not a cyberattack.
• The Uptime Institute finds 57% of operators say their most recent major outage cost over $100,000.
• One in five major outages now cost more than $1 million, for the second year running.

A single faulty update cascading into billions in estimated losses shows how concentrated digital infrastructure has become. When widely deployed security software or infrastructure services fail, the damage can ripple across thousands of downstream organizations. For reliable hosting, see our web hosting cost research.

Sources & additional resources

• ITIC. “ITIC 2024 Hourly Cost of Downtime Report Part 1.” Information Technology Intelligence Consulting.
• ITIC. “ITIC 2024 Hourly Cost of Downtime Part 2.” Information Technology Intelligence Consulting.
• Atlassian. “Calculating the Cost of Downtime.” Atlassian.
• Uptime Institute. “Annual Outage Analysis 2026.” Uptime Intelligence.
• Network World. “Network Connectivity Issues Are Leading Cause of IT Service Outages.” Network World.
• Network World. “Networking Errors Pose Threat to Data Center Reliability.” Network World.
• Parametrix. “CrowdStrike’s Impact on the Fortune 500.” Parametrix.
• Microsoft. “Helping Our Customers Through the CrowdStrike Outage.” Microsoft.
• CrowdStrike. “To Our Customers and Partners.” CrowdStrike.
• Uptime.is. “Uptime and Downtime SLA Calculator.” Uptime.is.

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