Tools

Cost of Downtime Calculator

Estimate what a platform outage actually costs, during the outage and in the months that follow. Pick where you are, your industry and your size. We'll show you the cost that lands after service is back.

Where is your business?
What industry are you in?

Financial Services

Banking, asset management, insurance, payments

Healthcare

Hospitals, clinics, health IT, medical devices

E-Commerce / Retail

Online retail, marketplaces, omnichannel

Manufacturing

Automotive, pharma, food & beverage, electronics

Telecommunications

Network operators, ISPs, UCaaS

SaaS / Technology

B2B SaaS, platforms, developer tools, cloud

How large is your organisation?

Small

Under €50M revenue, <200 employees

Medium

€50M–500M revenue, 200–1,500 employees

Large

€500M–5B revenue, 1,500–15,000 employees

Enterprise

€5B+ revenue, 15,000+ employees

Do other businesses depend on your platform?
Customers whose operations depend on your platform being up
Which rules apply to you?

We picked the ones that usually apply to your industry in Europe. Click to add or remove.

Cost during the outage
—
Total cost, including the months after
—
What your customers lose
—
6 hours
Who noticed?
The cost of learning

The outage is an unplanned investment. Here's what it costs to turn it into a fix you make once.

Learning investment

Investigation
—
Implementing fixes
—
Total learning
—

vs. one incident

Total incident cost
—
—
Cost timeline

How the cost builds up over time, from the first hour to the months after.

During the outage After service is back Learning from it Likely range
What's the tail? The costs that land after service is back, such as sales that stay low for weeks, customers who leave over the following months, and brand repair.

We filled these in for your industry and size. Change any you know.

The outage

hours
How much of your business stopped.

Revenue

What you keep from €100 of sales after paying for what you sold.
Subscriptions, fees or interest that still get paid.
Customers who come back and buy later.

People

Staff who can't work during the outage.
Pay plus benefits, per hour.
Use 100% if it all happened during working hours.

Response and learning

People working on the fix.
Vendors, outside help and overtime.
What an hour of your leaders' time costs.
Working out what happened.

After service is back

Credits you give customers to say sorry.
Extra support staff and messages to customers.

SLA credits you owe customers

Regulatory penalty

Tick this only if a regulator has fined you or is likely to.

We value lost sales as lost profit, the way insurers do. Staff time counts at normal pay.

All figures are estimates. Your real costs depend on your contracts, your market and the incident. What you type stays in your browser.

Updated September 2026:

  • Costs grow with the hours, as customers and teams react.
  • Every total comes with a likely range.
  • Pick Europe, the UK or the US for local staff costs, rules and currency.
  • Fixed: costs counted twice, a yearly figure used as hourly, figures the sources did not contain, and a fine added to every outage. Tests now catch each of these.

We ran the calculator on real outages with each company's own figures, and compared it with the costs each one published. It came in at 0.4x to 1.0x of the published costs. The published cost falls inside the likely range in 1 of 4 comparisons.

OutageCompared onDisclosedThis modelLikely rangeModel ÷ disclosedNotes
Rogers, Canada, July 2022 Goodwill credits CA$150.0M CA$66.8M CA$45.9M to CA$96.7M 0.4x Rogers refunded about CA$150M: five days of service to every wireless and cable customer. Rogers did not put a figure on its other outage costs. Its five days are the high end: AT&T credited one day after 12 hours in 2024. Some of the calculator's numbers come from this outage, so it only partly tests the calculator.
Optus, Australia, November 2023 Cost during the outage, goodwill and customer support A$60.0M A$30.2M A$23.5M to A$39.7M 0.5x Singtel set aside about A$60M (S$54M) for the outage. Singtel never said what the provision covers. Part of it may be set aside for the fine ACMA later issued (more than A$12M), which this calculator lists on its own. Most of the goodwill was free data.
KDDI, Japan, July 2022 Cost during the outage, goodwill and customer support ¥15.0B ¥11.0B ¥8.5B to ¥14.6B 0.7x KDDI forecast about ¥15bn off operating income for refunds and response costs (February 2023). A forecast. KDDI never published the final figure on its own. The calculator counts only affected mobile customers; applying the 63.5% to all of KDDI's revenue, energy and finance included, gives about 2.5x.
KDDI, Japan, July 2022 Goodwill credits ¥7.5B ¥7.8B ¥5.4B to ¥11.3B 1.0x KDDI expected its refunds to cost about ¥7.5bn, Okinawa Cellular included: two days of fees to 2.71M customers and ¥200 to 35.89M. Both refunds were paid automatically; part was contractual, part goodwill.

We left out TSB's 2018 migration failure (£330.2M). Its service was degraded for about seven and a half months, far longer than one outage. For the first three days the calculator gives about £9M for the outage, goodwill and customer support, and about £14M in total. TSB still informs two bank defaults: how many customers leave, and the cost of customer support.

Siemens and Senseye put an hour of unplanned downtime at a large car plant at about $2.3M. Plants reported that figure themselves, so we show it for comparison only.

Questions
How do you calculate the cost of downtime?

We start from typical numbers for your industry, size and where you are, and add up two things:

  • What you lose while you are down: profit on lost sales, staff time, and the cost of the fix.
  • What keeps costing you after: slower sales, customers who leave, goodwill credits, extra support and brand repair.

Change any number to match your business.

What does downtime cost per hour?

At our typical numbers, from about €1K an hour for a small business to about €99K for an enterprise. The costs that come after the outage are on top.

Pick your industry and size for your own estimate. The likely range under the total shows how far it could move.

Why does an outage cost more than the outage itself?

Because the bills keep coming after service is back:

  • Sales take weeks to recover.
  • Some customers leave.
  • You pay for goodwill credits, extra support and PR.

If only your own teams noticed, none of this happens.

Why does a longer outage cost so much more?

Because customers and teams change what they do as an outage drags on:

  • Past the first few hours, lost sales stop coming back and churn climbs.
  • More people get pulled in: more teams after the first hour, then executives, whose time costs more.
  • Goodwill credits keep growing with the hours.
What does the cost include beyond lost revenue?

Everything in the breakdown:

  • Idle staff time.
  • The people and vendors fixing it.
  • Leaders' time, during and after the outage.
  • SLA credits, if you run a platform.
  • Slower sales afterwards.
  • Customers who leave.
  • Goodwill credits and extra customer support.
  • Brand repair.
  • Reports to regulators under the rules you picked.

Possible fines only count if you add one. They are rare.

Is the calculator free?

Yes, with no sign-up. What you type stays in your browser.

We count, anonymously, which industry and size people pick and whether they run a platform. We use Plausible for that.

Start a conversation

Where do you go from here?

The best first step is a conversation to understand your current challenges and resilience goals. We'll explore whether our approach aligns with your needs and discuss which step in the journey makes sense for your organisation.

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