- The average Global 2000 enterprise faces a cost of $15,000 per minute after an incident or outage, Splunk study finds
- Customers are often the first to notice an incident that causes major reputational damage
- With many misidentifying attacks as IT issues, greater observability is needed
New data from Splunk has claimed that unplanned downtime is now costing Global 2000 companies around $600 billion each year, up 50% over the past two years.
Splunk reported that the average G2000 enterprise faces a cost per minute of $15,000 when an outage occurs, which equates to an average annual revenue loss of $95 million.
But the costs extend far beyond just revenue, with the average company seeing a 3.4% drop in share prices. Regulatory fines also average the not-so-insignificant sum of $51 million, the company disclosed.
The hidden costs of downtime
Serious cyber-attacks continue to rise, with high-profile incidents such as those at M&S and Jaguar Land Rover in 2025 dominating the headlines, but it’s not just the frequency that is increasing. So is cost, with the average ransomware payout nearly tripling since 2024 to $40 million.
One of the more unquantifiable results is a loss in brand reputation, with half (47%) of technology leaders revealing that customers are among the first to notice service disruptions. Four out of five (81%) believe that this results in customer loss.
Then there are the human resources needed to fix problems—one in five marketers say it takes them an entire quarter to get back to where they were before.
Time to resolution is another issue, with a third (36%) of security leaders reporting that downtime is often mistakenly attributed to an IT issue rather than a security breach, significantly delaying identification and remediation times.
“Downtime is inevitable,” said SVP and GM Kamal Hathi, but “long-term disruption is not.”
Hathi believes that “fit[ing] technology with business results, strength[ing] people with context and design[ing] systems that bend, but don’t break, under pressure” often the best results, indicating a greater need for observability and context.
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