Why Average Downtime Costs Fall Short

Downtime can create financial, operational, and customer impact, but the effect of any given event depends on the business it disrupts. 

Splunk estimates that unplanned downtime costs Global 2000 companies $600 billion each year. That figure has increased 50% in the past 2 years. 

The research offers a useful indicator of the scale of downtime risk. However, it cannot calculate the financial exposure of a specific disruption at your organization. For that, you need a service-and-dependency model of your enterprise. 

Industry Averages Have Limits 

When leaders make the case for resilience investment, a single cost-of-downtime figure can seem like a straightforward way to quantify exposure. 

Gartner cautions against relying on a generic average. It assumes that outages have the same duration, scope, timing, customer impact, and operational consequences. In practice, each of these factors can change the financial impact of an event. 

A checkout outage during a peak sales period can have a very different impact from a similar outage overnight in a slow season. The same is true for an unavailable customer service platform, a delayed payment process, or a critical service with a manual workaround. Generic figures are just that — generic. They can overstate or understate exposure because they don’t reflect the unique circumstances of your business. 

Impact Depends on Business Context 

A meaningful cost estimate begins with the service at stake, not the affected system or provider alone. 

A third-party disruption may affect a single contained activity, or it may interrupt several critical services at once. The difference depends on how the capability is used across the organization, how quickly disruption would affect customers or operations, and whether the business can continue through an alternate path. 

Teams should assess the conditions that determine business dependency criticality, including: 

• Time before the disruption creates unacceptable business impact 
• Concentration across critical services, products, regions, or customer experiences 
• Availability of alternate providers, manual workarounds, or internal recovery options 
• Realistic time and effort required to transition to another provider 
• Contractual recovery, notification, and exit commitments 
• Dependencies on systems, teams, data, and other third parties 
• This context separates a provider’s risk rating from the criticality of the service it supports. Two providers with similar assessment scores may require very different levels of contingency planning, investment, and executive attention if one supports a critical service with no viable substitute. 

For leaders, that creates a more practical view of exposure. 

Leaders Need Business-Specific Answers 

Leaders need to understand how a disruption affects their organization. That requires clear answers to four questions: 

• What is impacted? 
• What happens next? 
• What is the financial exposure? 
• What should be prioritized? 

A disaster recovery plan, business impact analysis, and dependency map are essential sources of information. During an incident, teams also need to understand which services are affected, whether impact is spreading, which recovery actions are available, and where the greatest exposure sits. 

The same information supports stronger planning before an event. Teams can use it to identify services with incomplete recovery strategies, dependencies without an alternate path, or recovery objectives that require more validation. 

Connect Recovery to Business Impact 

Fusion’s IT Disaster Recovery helps teams maintain connected information about applications, dependencies, recovery objectives, and recovery procedures.  

Recovery Optimization uses that information to calculate a recovery sequence based on the objective that matters most, such as recovery time objective adherence, service criticality, or financial exposure. 

The resulting sequence is explainable, reproducible, and auditable. Teams can use it to test recovery paths, identify dependency and capacity constraints, and show stakeholders why a particular recovery order supports the business. 

This creates a stronger link between technical recovery work and the outcomes leaders care about. Instead of relying on broad downtime assumptions, teams can assess the services at risk, the dependencies that shape recovery, and the actions that will help protect the organization. 

Build a Credible Case for Investment 

The $600 billion figure highlights the scale of downtime across large enterprises. A credible business case requires an organization to understand its own services, dependencies, recovery priorities, and potential impact. 

When teams can connect those inputs, they can explain what is affected, what should happen next, and where investment will strengthen recovery readiness. They can also give executives clearer evidence for prioritizing remediation and resilience spending. 

Want to know your exposure? Get a focused, executive-ready view of financial exposure, critical dependencies, and the decisions that require leadership attention — benchmarked against your sector’s peers. Request an exposure brief. 

Sources:  

• Cisco and Splunk, “The Hidden Costs of Downtime” (May 2026).  
• Gartner, “Why Business Leaders Don’t Care About the Cost of Downtime” (January 2026).