Here’s How Much Downtime Cost in 2025
IT downtime is one of the costliest hidden expenses plaguing modern enterprises. Popular beliefs claim that a single minute of downtime wipes out $9,000 in revenue. That figure is eye-catching, but it’s also misleading for most businesses.
In 2025, CloudSecureTech analyzed IT support tickets across diverse industries, revealing that downtime costs vary and often impact small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) differently than large enterprises.
Our results from an initial market survey found that the impact of downtime cannot be neatly summarized with a single dollar figure. The true cost depends on factors like the size of the business, the nature of the IT issue, and the scope of disruption (none of which comes as a surprise).
For SMBs, which generate $50 million or less in annual revenue, the $9,000-per-minute claim is wildly exaggerated. Understanding these nuances is critical for preventing losses that, though smaller on paper, can still be devastating over time.
Through this deep dive, you’ll learn how to calculate your own downtime costs. We’ll also cover strategies to mitigate these losses and keep your operations resilient, no matter the size of your organization.
This article is part of the ‘What’s Got Your Business Looking So Down(time)? (2025)’ series of articles based on market research conducted by CloudSecureTech.
The $9,000 Myth Doesn’t Apply to Everyone
The $9,000-per-minute downtime cost is oft-repeated, but it primarily applies to enterprises operating on billion-dollar annual revenues. For smaller businesses, this figure is a red herring.
Imagine applying the same number to an organization with $5 million in total yearly revenue; it simply doesn’t add up. SMB decision-makers who rely on this stat risk either overestimating their preparedness or underestimating their actual exposure to downtime risks.
Our research highlighted a more nuanced view. Consider that most SMBs belong to a different revenue category altogether. Given that the U.S. boasts nearly 33.2 million SMBs, it’s plain to see their realities differ sharply from large corporates.
A $9,000-per-minute loss would put a mid-sized accounting firm, for example, on the brink of disaster with every IT outage. Instead of chasing generalized figures, businesses need to establish benchmarks tailored to their individual operations.
By focusing on data points relevant to your company’s headcount and revenue base, you can make smarter decisions about your technology investments.
Downtime Costs Are Clear in Lost Wages
Diving into the real numbers, CloudSecureTech calculated the wage-related losses caused by IT downtime.
For every minute a single employee is impacted, your business loses an average of $0.67 in wages. While this might seem minor, the collective impact is anything but trivial.
Multiply $0.67 by the average downtime of 15.3 minutes per employee every day, and the daily cost balloons to $10.25 per employee.
For context: a company with 100 employees would lose $1,025 every day — just in wages alone. Over the course of a year, that’s over $250,000 lost without factoring in additional costs like missed deadlines, unhappy clients, or overtime hours to catch up.
These numbers reflect how downtime adds up not as a sudden tsunami, but a slow-draining leak that quietly eats into profitability.
What should resonate here is the importance of acting on incremental losses. SMBs working on leaner margins can’t afford these hits to productivity.
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Not All Downtime Hits the Same
Downtime costs vary wildly depending on the type of IT issue. While most think of downtime as a monolithic expense, our research found significant discrepancies in how individual problems play out.
Let’s start with the high end: network-related downtime, which incurs an average cost of $1,202.99 per incident. These events disrupt core operations, affecting entire teams and sidelining critical workflows.
On the opposite end are relatively lower-cost issues, such as phone system outages ($97.22 per incident) or short-term VPN disruptions ($120.73). While still frustrating, they’re localized and easier to navigate without major repercussions for the larger organization.
In the middle tier, more significant incidents like internet outages average $775.26, and server failures cost around $368.50. These mid-range problems may not grind your entire operation to a halt, but they still represent serious productivity losses.
If you’re managing an IT team, it’s vital to rank issues by their potential for disruption. Treating every outage or failure the same spreads your resources too thin. Instead, allocate resources where they’ll have the highest impact.
Downtime’s Real Costs Go Beyond Wages
If wage loss figures had you alarmed, consider what isn’t reflected in those calculations. Opportunity costs, lost revenue, and reputational damage can escalate IT downtime into a full-blown crisis.
For instance, e-commerce businesses facing even an hour-long server failure could miss out on thousands of dollars in sales. Meanwhile, clients disappointed by unreachable staff or delayed deliverables may not come back for a second round of contracts.
There are also indirect costs: employee morale, for instance, nosedives when key systems fail and workflows are interrupted. IT teams, often understaffed, face burnout as they scramble to respond to every crisis. Companies enmeshed in reactive IT strategies may see these “soft” costs spiral out of control faster than they realize.
Time Saved is Money Saved
Your best strategy to combat downtime? Don’t wait for it to happen. Proactive IT management tools like monitoring software and automated diagnostics empower you to identify small inefficiencies before they escalate.
Scheduled server maintenance and real-time anomaly detection provide the kind of infrastructure resilience businesses need in 2024.
Disaster recovery plans are no less critical. Companies with robust backup systems that kick in immediately during server failures or network outages often report dramatically reduced revenue losses for every incident.
If your downtime strategy doesn’t already incorporate a recovery timeline, you’re leaving money on the table.
Equally important is team readiness. Train employees to handle common problems like reconnecting to the network or troubleshooting VPNs. Not every delay needs to escalate to the IT team immediately.
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