Calculate how much IT downtime really costs your business per hour — including lost productivity, missed revenue, and recovery expenses.
| Cause | Typical Duration | Frequency (per year) | Prevention |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hardware Failure | 4–24 hours | 1–3 incidents | Monitoring & proactive replacement |
| Software Crash / Update | 1–4 hours | 3–6 incidents | Patch management & testing |
| Network Outage | 1–8 hours | 2–4 incidents | Redundant connectivity & monitoring |
| Cyber Attack / Ransomware | 24–72 hours | 0–1 incidents | Security stack & backup strategy |
| Human Error | 1–4 hours | 4–8 incidents | Training & access controls |
| Power Outage | 1–6 hours | 1–2 incidents | UPS & cloud failover |
| ISP / Internet Failure | 2–12 hours | 2–4 incidents | Dual ISP & SD-WAN |
| Cloud Service Outage | 1–8 hours | 1–3 incidents | Multi-cloud & DR planning |
Figures are industry averages for UK SMEs. Actual incident frequency and duration vary based on infrastructure quality and IT support arrangements. Talk to Cloudswitched about reducing your downtime risk.
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Estimates vary widely, but many UK SMEs lose somewhere between £1,000 and £10,000 per hour once lost staff productivity, missed sales, and recovery effort are factored in. The exact figure depends heavily on headcount, average revenue per hour, and how dependent daily operations are on the affected systems.
The main inputs are hourly revenue, number of staff affected, average salary cost, and typical recovery time. Indirect costs matter too — reputational damage, missed deadlines, and customer churn rarely show up in a spreadsheet but can outweigh the direct losses, especially for client-facing or e-commerce businesses.
Beyond wages paid for idle staff, downtime often triggers overtime to catch up, contractual penalties for missed deliverables, and emergency IT call-out fees. Customer-facing outages can also cause lasting reputational harm that is harder to quantify but genuinely affects future revenue, so a full cost picture is usually higher than a simple hourly wage calculation.
Proactive monitoring, redundant internet connections, tested backup and disaster recovery plans, and a support contract with a fast response SLA all shrink both the frequency and duration of outages. This calculator helps quantify what an hour of downtime is really worth, making it easier to justify investment in resilience.
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