Splunk has published research estimating that unplanned downtime now costs Global 2000 companies USD $600 billion a year, up 50% over two years.
Based on a survey of 2,000 executives conducted with Oxford Economics, the findings point to a sharp rise in the financial and operational fallout from outages. The average organisation now loses about USD $15,000 a minute during downtime and almost USD $95 million in annual revenue.
The effects extend well beyond immediate service disruption. Surveyed technology executives cited customer churn, regulatory penalties, ransomware costs, higher support demand and damage to brand perception among the wider consequences.
Shareholder value also appears at risk, with the research finding an average 3.4% fall in stock price after a single downtime incident.
Business costs
Among technology leaders, 81% said outages lead to customer loss. Nearly half, or 47%, said customers are often or very often the first to detect service degradation or full outages.
Regulatory and security-related impacts also featured prominently. Regulatory fines average USD $51 million per organisation, while average ransomware payouts have risen to USD $40 million, nearly triple the level recorded in 2024.
Public disclosure of a data breach was rated as one of the most disruptive hidden costs of downtime. Some 71% of technology executives described it as very or prohibitively disruptive, up from 23% in 2024.
Operational strain inside organisations was another recurring theme. Some 89% of tech leaders said incidents require large numbers of personnel to resolve, while 90% reported a rise in customer support demand during outages.
The impact is not limited to technical teams. The survey found that 76% of finance executives and 74% of marketing executives also feel pressure during downtime events. Nearly one in five marketing professionals said it can take a full quarter to restore brand health after remediation.
Security overlap
The research highlights a close link between outages and cyber risk. About 36% of security leaders said downtime is often or very often misclassified as an IT issue, potentially delaying the response to an attack.
Only 38% of technology executives said their organisations consistently identify the root cause of a downtime incident. Cybersecurity-related downtime tied to software-as-a-service and other third-party application issues has also nearly tripled since 2024, with 56% of security leaders saying such incidents happen often or very often.
That overlap between resilience and security is shaping investment choices. Companies are placing greater emphasis on stronger monitoring, automation and shared operational context rather than relying solely on hardware or data centre upgrades.
AI response
Companies are also spending more on artificial intelligence tools designed to prevent or respond to outages. The survey put median annual spending on such systems at USD $24.5 million.
Organisations Splunk classified as "AI Workflow and Triage Experts" reported better outcomes than others. Among that group, 74% avoided the need to publicly disclose a data breach in the past year, compared with 54% of non-experts.
They were also more likely to retain customers. The research found that 42% of the expert group said they had never lost customers because of downtime, compared with 15% of non-experts.
Even so, concerns about the technology remain widespread. Every technology leader surveyed said their organisation had experienced some form of AI-related downtime, while 68% said they were concerned that AI agents would behave unpredictably.
That tension is reflected in the report's emphasis on human oversight. It argues that AI is being used more as a support tool for triage and root cause analysis than as a substitute for human judgment, especially in environments where small errors can quickly escalate into broader outages.
"Downtime is inevitable; prolonged disruption is not," said Kamal Hathi, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Splunk, a Cisco company.
"The most resilient organisations are not the ones with the most tools or the biggest vision for AI. They are the ones that align technology with business outcomes, empower people with context, and design systems that bend, but do not break, under pressure," Hathi said.
Visibility push
The study also points to end-to-end observability as a growing investment priority. Nearly three-quarters of ITOps and engineering leaders ranked it as their top area for resilience-related spending.
Among organisations with the lowest downtime costs, 98% said end-to-end visibility was very or extremely important in reducing incidents. At the same time, 66% of ITOps and engineering leaders said they were prioritising automation to reduce human error, which the report identified as the leading cause of downtime across the technology stack.
Oxford Economics collected responses from executives at Global 2000 companies across 20 countries in APAC, EMEA, North America and Latin America, spanning sectors including financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, retail, the public sector, transport and technology.