What is Downtime?

Downtime is any span of time during which an IT system, service, or application is unavailable or so slow or degraded that users can’t finish their intended task. It can be planned (e.g., a scheduled maintenance window) or unplanned (hardware failure, software bug, cyber‑attack, human error).

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Excess downtime erodes revenue, customer trust, and SLA compliance.

Why Downtime matters

Downtime is more than a technical blip, it’s a direct hit to revenue, reputation, and regulatory posture. Recent benchmarks put the average cost of enterprise downtime at roughly $9 000 per minute, but the ripple effects extend far beyond the balance sheet:

• Customer trust: Repeated outages raise churn rates by up to 12 % as users jump to more reliable competitors.
• SLA penalties & credits: A 99.9 % uptime target allows just 43.8 minutes of downtime per month; falling short can trigger contractual refunds and third‑party audits.
• Developer productivity drag: Post‑incident rework, context switching, and mandatory retrospectives consume as much as  20% of engineering capacity.
• Regulatory & legal risk: Industries like fintech and healthcare face fines or compliance violations when availability SLAs aren’t met.

Bottom line: The faster you detect, diagnose, and resolve incidents, the sooner you protect both revenue and reputation, thus making resilient architecture, proactive monitoring, and a robust incident‑management workflow indispensable.

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Types of Downtime

Planned Downtime

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Planned downtime refers to service interruptions that teams intentionally schedule for upgrades, migrations, or preventive maintenance, usually announced in advance and executed during off‑peak hours.

Below are examples of planned downtime 

• Fortnite v36.30 scheduled maintenance (July 29  2025) – Epic Games took servers offline for roughly 2.5 hours to deploy a major patch. 
• AWS RDS maintenance window (May 8,  2025) – Select EU‑central‑1 database instances entered read‑only mode for 30 minutes during an engine patch rollout. 

Unplanned Downtime

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Unplanned downtime is any unexpected loss of availability caused by hardware failure, software bugs, configuration errors, cyber‑attacks, or external factors.

• Google Cloud global quota‑policy outage (June 12  2025) – A quota‑policy change propagated incorrectly, disrupting Compute Engine, Cloud SQL, and other core services across multiple regions for over an hour.
• Slack database‑routing outage (May 12  2025) – A database routing misconfiguration caused workspace logins, messaging, and file uploads to fail worldwide for roughly three hours. 

Dig deeper: Explore full root‑cause analyses of real incidents in the ilert Postmortem Library.

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Downtime and Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

Downtime is very often mentioned in combination with Service Level Agreements (SLAs). SLAs are contracts between service providers and clients that define the expected level of service, including how often the service should be up and running. SLAs set clear goals, such as maintaining 99.9% uptime, and describe what happens if these goals are not met, like financial penalties or service credits. Service providers must keep downtime to a minimum to meet these goals and avoid penalties.

Cost implications of Downtime

The financial cost of downtime varies widely based on company size, industry, and the criticality of affected systems, but the average remains alarmingly high. According to Forbes Tech Council, enterprise downtime costs about $9 000 per minute.

But costs extend beyond direct revenue loss:

• Productivity drain: Teams pause projects to triage incidents, eating into delivery velocity.
• Lost transactions: E-commerce systems or SaaS platforms may miss sales, fail signups, or trigger cart abandonment.
• Compliance penalties: SLAs, government regulations, or audits may trigger fines for availability failures.
• Brand damage: Downtime leads to negative press, social media backlash, and long-term customer erosion.

Even short-lived incidents can impact quarterly KPIs, especially for customer-facing services.

Strategies to minimize Downtime

There is no simple answer to the question: how to reduce downtime. To succeed and reach 99.99% uptime, companies employ various strategies. Here are a few to consider:

• Regular maintenance: Conduct routine system checks and updates to identify and address potential issues before they lead to failures.
• Redundancy and failover systems: Implement backup systems that can take over in case of primary system failures, ensuring continuous operations.
• Employee training: Educate staff on best practices and protocols to minimize human errors that could cause system outages.
• Robust cybersecurity measures: Deploy advanced security solutions to protect against cyber threats that could lead to downtime.

Incident management platforms: Utilizing incident management platforms like ilert enables organizations to detect, escalate, and resolve incidents faster. These platforms automate alerting and on-call scheduling, ensuring that critical issues reach the right personnel immediately. Additionally, they provide real-time collaboration and post-incident analytics, allowing businesses to improve their response strategies and reduce future downtime incidents.

Industry standards for uptime

Frequently asked questions 

What is downtime in IT?
Downtime in IT refers to any period when systems, networks, or applications are unavailable or not functioning as intended. This can result from planned maintenance or unplanned incidents.

What causes unplanned downtime?
Unplanned downtime is typically caused by factors such as hardware failures, software bugs, human error, configuration changes, cyberattacks, or cloud service disruptions.

How is downtime measured?
Downtime is measured as the total time a system is unavailable during a defined window, often monthly or annually, and is commonly expressed as a percentage of uptime (e.g., 99.9%).

What are the risks of downtime?
Extended downtime can lead to loss of revenue, SLA violations, reputational harm, customer churn, and even regulatory penalties in compliance-heavy industries.

How can businesses minimize downtime?
By investing in observability, incident response tooling, failover systems, and routine maintenance and by preparing teams through training and postmortems, companies can reduce the frequency and impact of downtime.

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