Million-dollar outages make resilience a business decision

For an enterprise-owned data center, an outage can interrupt the work the business depends on. Customer transactions may stop, clinical systems may become unavailable, or a research team may lose essential computing. Recovery costs and lost productivity can continue after the power comes back.⁴

Uptime Institute’s 2026 outage analysis reports that 57% of respondents to its 2025 annual survey said their most recent major outage cost more than $100,000. For the second year in a row, one in five said their most recent impactful outage cost more than $1 million. Uptime also reports that outage frequency per site has declined for the fifth consecutive year.¹

For an owner, the useful takeaway is the scale of potential business exposure. Understanding which services would stop, and what recovery would involve, helps make resilience spending a business decision.⁴

Power remains the leading cause of impactful outages in Uptime’s findings, with failures involving UPS systems, transfer switches and generators dominant. Grid constraints and high-density workloads add new pressure points.¹

A facility can have redundancy on paper and still leave a critical load exposed. Equipment served through a single UPS or rack power distribution unit can be a single point of failure.² A UPS operating on bypass may keep equipment running while leaving it without the protection the owner expects.³

This makes the actual operating arrangement important: which loads are protected, what changes during maintenance, and whether alarms and procedures reveal a loss of protection before another failure occurs.^{2, 3}

Before the next upgrade or budget review, bring facilities, IT and business owners together around five decisions:

• Business exposure: which essential services would stop, what downtime can the organization tolerate, and what would recovery cost?
• Power-path dependencies: where do critical loads share components or depend on a single feed, and what happens when equipment is isolated for maintenance?
• Equipment readiness: do generator capacity and fuel arrangements, UPS batteries, transfer equipment, monitoring and service support match the current load?
• Cooling and controls: which supporting systems must remain available through an electrical event, and how will they recover? Revisit these assumptions when adding AI or other concentrated loads.
• Testing and recovery: have operating sequences, maintenance procedures and recovery plans been checked against the current configuration, and does the team know its responsibilities?^{3, 4}

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