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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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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 ...

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Regardless of their scale, business decisions often take time, effort, and a lot of back-and-forth discussion to reach any sort of actionable conclusion ... Any means of streamlining this process and getting from complex problems to optimal solutions more efficiently and reliably is key. How can organizations optimize their decision-making to save time and reduce excess effort from those involved? ...

As enterprises accelerate their cloud adoption strategies, CIOs are routinely exceeding their cloud budgets — a concern that's about to face additional pressure from an unexpected direction: uncertainty over semiconductor tariffs. The CIO Cloud Trends Survey & Report from Azul reveals the extent continued cloud investment despite cost overruns, and how organizations are attempting to bring spending under control ...

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According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

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Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...