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Downtime cost calculator

An order of magnitude, calculated from your own numbers, to see what an hour of downtime means for you.

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Indicative estimate based only on what you enter: it does not account for reputational damage, long-term customer loss or regulatory consequences. Your numbers never leave your browser. For a reliable value, a business impact analysis remains the right method.

Compare with public benchmarks by industry

Public cost benchmarks

Public benchmarks, by industry, and real incidents to give a concrete sense of what's at stake.

91% of mid-size and large enterprises estimate the cost of one hour of downtime at more than US$300,000. [1]
41% of large enterprises put that cost between $1M and over $5M US per hour. [1]
Most-cited historical benchmark $5,600 US per minute, about $336,000 US per hour (Gartner, 2014). [2]

By industry

IndustryOrder of magnitudeContext
Financial servicesOften above $5M US/hourITIC ranks banking and finance among the sectors whose average hourly cost exceeds $5M US. [1]
Energy and utilities≈ $2.48M US/hour (estimate)An aggregated estimate for the energy sector; a prolonged outage adds non-financial costs on top. [3]
Manufacturing — automotiveUp to $2.3M US/hourAn idle automotive production line, per the Siemens True Cost of Downtime 2024 report. [4]
Manufacturing — sector average≈ $260,000 US/hourAggregated estimate for the manufacturing sector, published by Pingdom. [3]
Retail≈ $1.1M US/hour (estimate)Aggregated estimate; the real impact depends heavily on timing (see Amazon Prime Day below). [3]
Healthcare≈ $636,000 US/hour (estimate)Aggregated estimate for the sector; the Change Healthcare incident showed impact reaching well beyond the financial. [3]

Real incidents

Retail

Amazon — Prime Day 2018

An outage of roughly 75 minutes during the year's busiest sales event.

Analyst estimates: from $90M to over $99M US in lost sales, about $1.2M US per minute. [6]

Finance

TSB — botched migration

Banking services disrupted for months after an IT migration.

£48.65m fine; total costs estimated by the bank at over £330m.

Read the case study
Energy

Colonial Pipeline — ransomware

5,500 miles of pipeline shut down for 6 days, as a precaution.

$4.4M US ransom paid, plus fuel shortages along the whole East Coast.

Read the case study
Retail

Marks & Spencer — cyberattack

Online orders suspended for about 7 weeks.

Impact estimated at about £300m off annual profit.

Read the case study
Healthcare

Change Healthcare — ransomware

Billing exchange disruption affecting most of the US healthcare system.

$22M US ransom paid, without preventing a second extortion attempt.

Read the case study
Aviation

CrowdStrike / Delta — global outage

About 8.5 million Windows devices down on the same day.

Delta reports about $500M US in costs for 5 days of disruption.

Read the case study
Aviation

Southwest Airlines — operational meltdown

16,900 flights cancelled and over two million passengers stranded over the 2022 holidays, after a winter storm.

Over $600M US in refunds and reimbursements, and a $140M US DOT penalty ($35M of it in cash): over $750M US in total, per the DOT. [5]

These figures come from public surveys and analyses and vary with the calculation method used (lost revenue, productivity, penalties, reputation). They give an order of magnitude, not a number to apply directly to your organization: the best way to know your own hourly cost is a business impact analysis.

Sources

  1. ITIC — 2024 Hourly Cost of Downtime Report
  2. Atlassian — Cost of downtime (citing Gartner, 2014)
  3. Pingdom — Average Cost of Downtime per Industry
  4. Acronis — How unplanned OT downtime is draining industrial profits (citing Siemens, True Cost of Downtime 2024)
  5. U.S. Department of Transportation — DOT penalizes Southwest Airlines $140 million for 2022 holiday meltdown
  6. TechCrunch — What Amazon lost (and made) on Amazon Prime Day