Uptime Institute’s 2022 Outage Analysis has revealed that downtime costs and consequences are in fact worsening as industry efforts to curb outage frequency fall short. The research details latest digital infrastructure failure rates, increasing outage costs and impacts, top downtime causes and more.
The digital infrastructure sector is struggling to achieve a measurable reduction in outage rates and severity, and the financial consequences and overall disruption from outages are steadily increasing, according to Uptime Institute, which has released the findings of its 2022 annual outage analysis report.
“Digital infrastructure operators are still struggling to meet the high standards that customers expect and service level agreements demand – despite improving technologies and the industry’s strong investment in resiliency and downtime prevention,” said Andy Lawrence, Founding Member and Executive Director, Uptime Institute Intelligence.
“The lack of improvement in overall outage rates is partly the result of the immensity of recent investment in digital infrastructure and all the associated complexity that operators face as they transition to hybrid, distributed architectures,” said Lawrence. “In time, both the technology and operational practices will improve, but at present, outages remain a top concern for customers, investors and regulators. Operators will be best able to meet the challenge with rigorous staff training and operational procedures to mitigate the human error behind many of these failures.”
Uptime’s annual outage analysis is unique in the industry and draws on multiple surveys, information supplied by Uptime Institute members and partners, and its database of publicly reported outages.
Key findings include:
- High outage rates haven’t changed significantly
- The proportion of outages costing over $100,000 has soared in recent years
- Power-related problems continue to dog data center operators
- Networking issues are causing a large portion of IT outages.
- The overwhelming majority of human error-related outages involve ignored or inadequate procedures
- External IT providers cause most major public outages
- Prolonged downtime is becoming more common in publicly reported outages
- Public outage trends suggest there will be at least 20 serious, high-profile IT outages worldwide each year
