The True Cost of Downtime
Kalamazoo, MI | November 25, 2025
This article at a glance:
- Downtime can happen at any time, and for reasons out of your control
- Downtime can cost SMBs thousands of dollars per hour
- While unplanned downtime is inevitable, what matters is how you react
Here’s a question: what happens when the “immune system” of the internet fails?
Well last week, the world found out:
20% of all websites either crashed or slowed service
Services like ChatGPT, Indeed, and Uber went down
On Tuesday November 18th, Cloudflare (a sort of firewall for the internet) had an outage.
Though it only lasted for less than a day, it served as a reminder of the true cost of downtime in our modern world.
Today, let’s talk about everything downtime-related:
How downtime happens
How to calculate your downtime cost
Backup solutions for small businesses
How Downtime Happens (And Why You Need an IT Recovery Plan)
“Downtime” is the amount of time that a machine (such as a computer) is unusable.
Downtime has four main causes:
Hardware or software failures
Disasters and power outages
Cyberattacks
Human error
But how exactly does downtime happen? Well, let’s take a look at a couple real-world scenarios.
Hardware or Software Failure: Amazon Web Services
The Situation: On October 20th of this year, Amazon Web Services (AWS) faced a massive disruption. For over 15 hours, services such as Slack, Snapchat, and Atlassian were either slowed to a crawl or completely stopped.
The Cause: A single DNS was set up improperly.
For those who don’t know, a DNS is basically like a website’s address—you can think of as an entry in the internet’s phone book. Because there was an error in Amazon’s DNS, finding it in the “phone book” became impossible. As a result, more and more services that used AWS broke every minute.
Human Error: 2023 FAA System Outage
The Situation: In January 2023, the FAA released a nationwide ground stop, delaying nearly 10,000 flights across the United States.
The Cause: Well, an engineer reportedly “replaced one file with another” by mistake. That’s all it took.
A simple, honest mistake ended up costing the US millions of dollars and delaying hundreds of thousands of passengers.
And while I’m sure that the engineer who made the mistake is more than a little embarrassed, this example also underscores the truth of downtime prevention: one person should never have enough power to take down an entire system.
In a human system, the only guarantee is that someone will inevitably make a mistake. That’s why the true failure for the FAA wasn’t this one employee’s accident—it was the failure to identify that such a simple, human mistake could lead to such huge consequences.
So, when you’re trying to prevent downtime, don’t make the FAA’s mistake. Always factor in human error.
Calculating Your Downtime Costs
At last, we arrive at the big question: how much could downtime cost you?
Well, the cost will (predictably) vary based on the size and industry of the business. But as a rule of thumb, SMBs usually lose $137-$427 per minute. Meanwhile, high-risk industries can suffer up to $5 million per hour.
To roughly calculate your downtime costs, I recommend multiplying these three variables:
Employee wages
Opportunity cost
Total hours of downtime
But who likes doing math? Instead, use this downtime calculator we made just for you:
Downtime Cost Calculator
$200
Total downtime cost:
$800
Preventing Downtime: Backup Solutions for Small Businesses
I’ll give you the bad news first: no way to prevent downtime entirely. Like we saw with Cloudflare, even the tech giants aren’t immune to it.
That said, you can set realistic goals and make practical changes.
1. Set Realistic Goals for Downtime
Pledging to always be up and running 100% of the time isn’t just unrealistic—it’s bad business.
If you set the expectation with your customers that you will always be up and running, then you may end up burning bridges or even getting sued.
But if you don’t set high expectations for your service, who would ever want to work with you?
That’s why realistic downtime goals are important. And depending on your size and industry, your downtime goal will vary.
Here’s a quick breakdown of downtime goals by company size and industry:
99% Uptime (“Two Nines”).
Allowed Downtime: 2-3 days per year.
Industries: Small businesses, small e-commerce sites, anything where outages are inconvenient but not catastrophic
99.9% Uptime (“Three Nines”)
Allowed Downtime: 8 hours per year.
Industries: Schools, professional services, IT providers, anywhere outages damage reputation but aren’t life-or-death.
99.99% Uptime (“Four Nines”)
Allowed Downtime: 52 minutes per year.
Industries: Finance, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, anywhere downtime drastically increases costs or can create material harm to users.
99.999% Uptime (Five Nines)
Allowed Downtime: 5 minutes per year.
Industries: Energy, water, transit; essential for critical infrastructure where failures cause mass societal disruptions.
While unplanned downtime is bad news, planned downtime is usually fine (as long as it’s not excessive). Most systems need planned, routine downtime for maintenance and software updates. So, if a trusted IT professional asks to take a system down for an hour or two for maintenance, find a low-impact time (generally before or after business hours) and go for it!
2. Keep Data Backups: the 3-2-1 Rule
The 3-2-1 Backup Rule is a simple strategy for keeping your data available.
Like the name implies the 3-2-1 Rule calls for three total copies of your data across two different types of media, with one copy stored off-site.
If you learn from example like me, then here’s how a company might use the 3-2-1 Rule:
Example: Mutual Money Bags, an accounting firm, saves their data in three different places:
The First Place: the regular, “operating” data that everyone uses on their computers day-to-day.
The Second Place: An external hard drive in a locked room.
The Third Place: in Microsoft Azure, Microsoft’s cloud storage service.
Explanation: Here’s how Mutual Money Bags followed the 3-2-1 Rule:
3 Copies of Data: Mutual Money Bags kept three versions of their data total—one on their computers, one on a separate hard drive, and one in Microsoft Azure. By keeping three types of data, Mutual Money Bags made it highly unlikely that all three would ever be lost at the same time.
2 Types of Media: They kept their data stored on both the company computers and on a separate hard drive. That way, Mutual Money Bags can easily access a backup if there’s ever and equipment failure (like the computers break or the hard drive is lost).
1 Off-Site Copy: Mutual Money Bags kept a third copy of their data stored in Microsoft Azure. By storing the third copy of their data off-site and in the cloud, Mutual Money Bags has a backup in case of a disaster like a flood, a fire, or theft.
While it may seem like a lot at first, the 3-2-1 Rule is a lot easier to follow once you get started.
And look at it this way: since you already have one copy of your data that you use every day, you’re already 1/3rd of the way there!
3. Have an Incident Response Plan
In data security, failing to plan is planning to fail. That’s why it’s essential to have an incident response plan.
Eventually, one of your systems will go down—that’s just the nature of IT.
Luckily, a solid incident response plan can turn a would-be catastrophe into a minor hiccup.
If you don’t already have a plan, then I recommend a 4-step incident response:
Identify Your Incident Response Team. Before an incident ever occurs, everyone involved should know exactly how to react. That means defining who is on your incident response team and making sure everyone knows what their roles are.
Monitor for Threat Detection. With your team, discuss all possible downtime threats. Think about natural disasters, cybersecurity breaches, and human error. Then, set up a routine to help monitor for red flags.
Practice, Practice, Practice. Once your team knows how to react to different downtime incidents, do a run-through of each. By the end, everyone should feel confident and know what they should do if an incident occurs tomorrow.
Post-Incident Follow Up. Depending on the incident, you may need to check for cybersecurity threats, document areas of improvement, or notify customers of the downtime. Plan out each follow-up in advance, so you don’t forget anything when the time comes.
Whatever your incident response plan looks like, always make sure of one thing: make sure everyone knows exactly when and how to communicate an issue.
At the end of the day, an incident response only works if your responders know when there’s been an incident.
So by whatever means necessary, just make sure that everyone knows who to call when it hits the fan.
4. Partner with a Managed Service Provider
Managed service providers are an affordable alternative to staffing an entire IT department in-house.
As a fully staffed organization of IT professionals, a manager service provider will offer all the bells and whistles of downtime prevention, like:
On-premise backup solutions
Cloud-based backup solutions
Managed cybersecurity
System maintenance and software updates
A managed service provider will also handle nitty-gritty details like the 3-2-1 Rule and Incident Response Plan, so your team never has to waste time worrying about it again.
Key Takeaways: Downtime (and How to Avoid It)
Downtime isn’t just an inconvenience. Downtime is a threat to your:
Reputation
Infrastructure
Customers’ experience
Bottom line
But luckily, there are ways to keep downtime to a bare minimum.
By following some of the advice we discussed here, you can manage costs and stay operational.
Or to save time and thousands of dollars on downtime each year, click here to contact our team at Omega Computer Services today!
Frequently Asked Questions
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“Downtime” is any length of time where a system in your organization stops working. Some common types of downtime include internet outages, data loss, and website crashes.
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The biggest mistake that leads to downtime is relying on one single point of failure (e.g. a single data backup, a single employee, a single Wi-Fi router).
Without backup plans, downtime becomes increasingly likely—and increasingly lengthy.
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Your cyber insurance may cover security-related downtime. That said, you won’t receive a payout unless you meet certain cybersecurity standards (such as keeping backups, using 2FA, and routinely updating software).
