Tools

Cost of Downtime Calculator

Estimate what a platform outage actually costs — not just during the outage, but in the months that follow. Pick your industry and size. We'll show you the number most models miss.

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, 200–2,000 employees

Large

$500M–5B revenue, 2,000–20,000 employees

Enterprise

$5B+ revenue, 20,000+ employees

Do other businesses depend on your platform?
Customers whose operations depend on your platform being up
50
Acute cost — during the outage
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Total incident cost — including the tail
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6 hours
The cost of learning

The outage is an unplanned investment. Here's what it costs to turn it into a lesson you never pay for twice.

Learning investment

Incident response
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Investigation
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Implementing fixes
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Total learning
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vs. one incident

Total incident cost
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Cost timeline

The orange band is what you lose during the outage. The red area above it is the tail — the cost that keeps accumulating after service is restored. The gap between the two is what most models miss and what your SLA doesn't cover.

Acute cost (during outage) Tail cost (after recovery)
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What's the tail? The outage ends when service comes back up. The costs don't. Customers leave over the following days. Revenue stays depressed for weeks as trust rebuilds. Regulatory investigations open months later. Brand repair takes quarters. The tail is everything that lands after the incident is "resolved" — and it's usually larger than the outage itself.

Full cost breakdown

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Adjust assumptions

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Defaults are based on published research for your industry and size. Override with your actual numbers.

hours
6 hrs
your organisation
fraction of business impacted by this outage
100%
unable to work during outage
50%
headcount
fully loaded
% of monthly fees credited
15%
your vendor bill, or what clients pay you — used for SLA credits
people on the bridge during outage
forensics, tooling, RCA — scales with org complexity
engineers implementing remediation
time to implement architectural fixes
fully loaded hourly cost — BLS: $75–150 for tech

Sources & methodology

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  • Splunk / Oxford Economics, "The Hidden Costs of Downtime," Jun 2024. 2,000 executives, Global 2000, 53 countries.
  • ITIC, "2024 Hourly Cost of Downtime Survey." 1,000+ firms.
  • IBM / Ponemon, "Cost of a Data Breach Report 2024." 553 organisations, 16 countries.
  • Siemens / Senseye, "True Cost of Downtime 2024." Manufacturing-specific.
  • PagerDuty, Incident Cost Survey, Jun 2024. 500 IT leaders.
  • Uptime Institute, "Annual Outage Analysis 2024."
  • JChang Law, "SLA Credits vs. Actual Losses," 2024.
  • Parametrix, "CrowdStrike Outage: Insured Losses for Fortune 500," Jul 2024.
  • Uptrends, "API Uptime Report Q1 2025."
  • Reichheld / Bain & Company; HBR, "The Value of Keeping the Right Customers" (2014).
  • Baymard Institute; Akamai, page load and abandonment research.
  • ESMA, "CSDR Settlement Discipline," Nov 2024. DTCC/SIFMA, T+1 implementation data.
  • CSSF Circular 24/856, NAV error thresholds and investor compensation.
  • SWIFT, held-up payments investigation costs.
  • Censinet; TigerConnect, healthcare IT downtime impact, 2024.
  • ASQ; MachineMetrics, post-restart quality defect rates.
  • CustomerGauge, "NPS and Churn Benchmarks," 2024. Telecom-specific.
  • Regulatory: DORA (EU 2022/2554), HIPAA (HHS), FCA/Ofcom/FCC enforcement data, GDPR Art. 32.

Cascade multipliers (downstream customer impact) are estimated from SLA-gap analysis and industry disruption patterns. Churn cost is modelled against 2% of annual revenue (estimated fraction of customer base directly affected by a single outage) multiplied by industry-specific replacement cost ratios.

All calculations are illustrative. Actual costs depend on contract terms, market conditions, regulatory response, and incident specifics. Nothing is sent to a server — all calculations run in your browser.

Model validation

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We validated this model against documented outages with publicly reported total costs — Synnovis/NHS (2024), Rogers (2022), TSB (2018), and Shopify (2025) — across healthcare, telecom, financial services, and e-commerce. The model lands between 0.4× and 0.9× of reported costs, meaning it tends to be conservative. Every default is sourced from published research (Splunk, ITIC, IBM/Ponemon, Siemens, BLS, DORA, HIPAA), and every parameter is adjustable. The model is designed to start a conversation about resilience investment, not to replace forensic accounting.

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.

Book a Call