The Real Cost of IT Downtime (And How to Calculate Yours)
Ask most business owners what an hour of downtime costs them and you’ll get a shrug or a guess. That guess is almost always low, because the visible costs are only part of the number.
Start with lost revenue per hour
Take your annual revenue, divide by working hours in a year, and you have a rough baseline. For revenue-generating systems specifically – e-commerce, booking, point of sale – this number alone is often sobering.
Add idle labor
Every employee who cannot work because a system is down is still being paid. Multiply headcount affected by their hourly rate by hours down, and that number climbs fast in any team larger than a handful of people.
Factor in recovery time, not just downtime
The outage ending is not the same as being back to normal. Data re-entry, queue backlogs, and catching up on delayed work all add hours that don’t show up in an “uptime” report.
Downtime cost is not what breaks during the outage. It’s everything that has to be rebuilt afterward.
Don't skip reputational cost
Missed customer commitments, delayed responses, and visible outages erode trust in ways that are real but harder to put a number on – which is exactly why they get left out of most estimates.
The bottom line
Run the math once, honestly, and the case for redundancy, monitoring, and proactive maintenance usually makes itself.