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Data Center Outage Frequency Decreasing

Overall outage frequency and the general level of reported severity continue to decline, according to the Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute. However, cyber security incidents are on the rise and often have severe, lasting impacts.

"Outages overall have slowed down," said Andy Lawrence, founding member and executive director, Uptime Intelligence. "Data center operators are facing a growing number of external risks beyond their control, including power grid constraints, extreme weather, network provider failures and third-party software issues. And despite a more volatile risk landscape, improvements are occurring."

Key Findings Include:

Outages Less Frequent and Less Severe

Outages are becoming less frequent and less severe relative to the rapid growth of digital infrastructure. This trend has held for several years, underscoring industry progress in risk management and reliability.

Power is leading cause of impactful outages

Power remains the leading cause of impactful outages. Outages from IT and networking issues increased in 2024, totaling 23% of impactful outages. This trend reflects the long-term move toward colocation providers, cloud, and other third-party services. While outsourcing may reduce the risk for some enterprises, major failures still occur, sometimes with serious consequences. This rise is likely caused by increased IT and network complexity, leading to issues with change management and misconfigurations.

Software-based and distributed resiliency tools expanding

Software-based and distributed resiliency tools improve uptime but can also introduce new risks and complexities. The use of software-based resiliency strategies alongside physical failover/redundancy is undoubtedly contributing to overall improvements in availability. However, the added complexity brings its own challenges and can blur lines of responsibility for failures, complicating root cause analysis and outage classification.

The pace of industry transformation accelerating

Soaring demand for AI is straining existing infrastructure designs — especially around power and cooling — while electricity grid limitations and global trade tensions introduce new uncertainty in supply chains and expansion plans. Together, these pressures could eventually affect the stability of current reliability trends.

Human error-related outages rising

For 2025, the proportion of human error-related outages caused by failure to follow procedures rose by ten percentage points compared with 2024. The failure of staff to follow procedures has become an even greater cause of outages than in the previous year, suggesting a major opportunity to reduce incidents through training and process review.

The overwhelming majority of human error-related outages involve ignored or inadequate procedures. Nearly 40% of organizations have suffered a major outage caused by human error over the past three years. Of these incidents, 85% stem from staff failing to follow procedures or from flaws in the processes and procedures themselves. The reason for this rise is unclear but may be a consequence of the rapid growth of industry and the resulting staff shortages in many regions. While improving documentation and processes remains important, greater focus on staff training and real-time operational support may reduce risks more effectively.

Cloud and Internet Provider outages declining

For 2024, outages attributed to digital service providers increased, while those from cloud/internet giants declined, possibly due to hyperscalers' investments in distributed resiliency and regional failover.

Outages decreasing in Financial sector

For the third consecutive year, the financial sector saw a decline in outage frequency compared with the long-term average since 2020. This improvement may reflect the impact of stricter regulations and heightened oversight following several major, high-profile outages prior to 2021.

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Data Center Outage Frequency Decreasing

Overall outage frequency and the general level of reported severity continue to decline, according to the Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute. However, cyber security incidents are on the rise and often have severe, lasting impacts.

"Outages overall have slowed down," said Andy Lawrence, founding member and executive director, Uptime Intelligence. "Data center operators are facing a growing number of external risks beyond their control, including power grid constraints, extreme weather, network provider failures and third-party software issues. And despite a more volatile risk landscape, improvements are occurring."

Key Findings Include:

Outages Less Frequent and Less Severe

Outages are becoming less frequent and less severe relative to the rapid growth of digital infrastructure. This trend has held for several years, underscoring industry progress in risk management and reliability.

Power is leading cause of impactful outages

Power remains the leading cause of impactful outages. Outages from IT and networking issues increased in 2024, totaling 23% of impactful outages. This trend reflects the long-term move toward colocation providers, cloud, and other third-party services. While outsourcing may reduce the risk for some enterprises, major failures still occur, sometimes with serious consequences. This rise is likely caused by increased IT and network complexity, leading to issues with change management and misconfigurations.

Software-based and distributed resiliency tools expanding

Software-based and distributed resiliency tools improve uptime but can also introduce new risks and complexities. The use of software-based resiliency strategies alongside physical failover/redundancy is undoubtedly contributing to overall improvements in availability. However, the added complexity brings its own challenges and can blur lines of responsibility for failures, complicating root cause analysis and outage classification.

The pace of industry transformation accelerating

Soaring demand for AI is straining existing infrastructure designs — especially around power and cooling — while electricity grid limitations and global trade tensions introduce new uncertainty in supply chains and expansion plans. Together, these pressures could eventually affect the stability of current reliability trends.

Human error-related outages rising

For 2025, the proportion of human error-related outages caused by failure to follow procedures rose by ten percentage points compared with 2024. The failure of staff to follow procedures has become an even greater cause of outages than in the previous year, suggesting a major opportunity to reduce incidents through training and process review.

The overwhelming majority of human error-related outages involve ignored or inadequate procedures. Nearly 40% of organizations have suffered a major outage caused by human error over the past three years. Of these incidents, 85% stem from staff failing to follow procedures or from flaws in the processes and procedures themselves. The reason for this rise is unclear but may be a consequence of the rapid growth of industry and the resulting staff shortages in many regions. While improving documentation and processes remains important, greater focus on staff training and real-time operational support may reduce risks more effectively.

Cloud and Internet Provider outages declining

For 2024, outages attributed to digital service providers increased, while those from cloud/internet giants declined, possibly due to hyperscalers' investments in distributed resiliency and regional failover.

Outages decreasing in Financial sector

For the third consecutive year, the financial sector saw a decline in outage frequency compared with the long-term average since 2020. This improvement may reflect the impact of stricter regulations and heightened oversight following several major, high-profile outages prior to 2021.

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The Latest

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

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