- The average Global 2000 company faces a cost of $15,000 per minute after an incident or outage, according to a Splunk study
- Customers are often the first to notice an incident, causing significant damage to your reputation.
- Since many attacks misidentify IT problems, greater observability is needed
New data from Splunk claims that unplanned downtime now costs Global 2000 companies around $600 billion each year, marking a 50% increase over the past two years.
Splunk reported that the average G2000 company faces a cost per minute of $15,000 when an outage occurs, which translates to an average annual revenue loss of $95 million.
But the costs extend far beyond revenue: The average company experiences a 3.4% drop in stock prices. Regulatory fines also average the not-so-insignificant sum of $51 million, the company revealed.
The hidden costs of downtime
Serious cyberattacks continue to rise, with high-profile incidents such as those at M&S and Jaguar Land Rover in 2025 dominating the headlines, but it’s not just the frequency that is increasing. They are also costs, with the average payment for ransomware almost tripling from 2024 to $40 million.
One of the most unquantifiable results is the loss of brand reputation: half (47%) of technology leaders reveal that customers are among the first to notice service interruptions. Four in five (81%) believe this results in a loss of customers.
Then there are the human resources required to rectify the problems: one in five marketers say it takes them an entire quarter to return to their previous state.
Resolution time is another issue: a third (36%) of security leaders report that downtime is often wrongly attributed to an IT issue rather than a security breach, severely slowing identification and remediation times.
“Downtime is inevitable,” said senior vice president and general manager Kamal Hathi, but “extended outages are not.”
Hathi believes that “aligning[ing] technology with business results, enhance[ing] people with context and design[ing] “Systems that bend, but don’t break, under pressure” tend to have the best results, indicating a greater need for observability and context.
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